what i will miss the most

In the spirit of not being afraid of death, I’ve been trying something different. Instead of treating death like this abstract yet welcome thing, I’ve been forcing myself to sit with the specifics. With the quiet, personal losses that would actually matter to me if I were to die today.

For example, my reading list.

I will never finish my TBR. Ever. There are books I’ve already saved, shelved, and archived over the years. And more will keep coming. There will always be something new, something that fits perfectly into my taste, something I would have loved. I will keep adding and adding, and then at some point, I will die, and that list will remain unfinished. Not just unfinished, but permanently abandoned.

And it doesn’t stop there.

There are books that will come out after I’m gone. Books that would have completely belonged to me. Books I would have highlighted, talked about, recommended, obsessed over. And I will never even know they exist. That part bothers me more than the unfinished list. The idea that there are things meant for me that I will never even get the chance to discover.

Then there’s something that might sound selfish, but I will never know how people react to my absence.

I know I will be grieved. I know people will care. But I will never know how, exactly. I will never know the specifics. The quiet moments. The unexpected reactions. The people I didn’t think would care but do. The people I thought would care more but don’t. I won’t know the shape of my impact. I won’t get to observe it, understand it, or even question it. It’s a kind of curiosity that will never be satisfied.

And then there’s knowledge.

I love knowing things. I love gist, information, conversations, patterns, context, theories. I like understanding how things connect. And death puts a hard stop to that. Not a pause. Not a break. A full stop. There will always be things I don’t know, but death freezes that gap permanently.

There are things I will never understand fully. There are things I will never even hear about. Entire events, ideas, cultural shifts, conversations, discoveries, all happening without me, forever.

It’s not just that I won’t know everything. It’s that I won’t even get the chance to keep trying.

Then there will be unexpressed thoughts.

Not just the obvious ones. Not just I love you or I appreciate you or you matter to me. Those are important, yes, but that’s not even the core of it for me. I love talking. I love explaining things. I love getting my point across. I love building an idea out loud, shaping it, refining it, pushing it until it becomes exactly what I mean.

And there are so many thoughts I haven’t expressed properly.

Not because I didn’t have them, but because I didn’t say them to the right people, in the right way, at the right time. There are conversations I didn’t have. Points I didn’t fully land. Ideas that stay incomplete because I haven’t push them out of my head and into the world.

If I die, they stay that way.

So, shall we skip death?

Buy me a coffee or show me love!