The Second Death

I didn’t write this to understand what happened—I wrote it because silence started to feel like compliance.

It has been one month since Gage died.

The sentence doesn’t tremble. It waits. It has settled into the architecture of my days, not as language, but as pressure. I say it without expression now, not because I’ve accepted it, but because I haven’t found anything truer.

The world has adjusted. That’s what happens. The calls space out. The phrasing evens. People step gently around the subject, as if grief is something I might drop if startled. But I’m not holding it. It’s holding me.

Time didn’t break. That would have made more sense. Instead, it stayed ordinary. The mail comes. The light changes. I respond when spoken to. And somewhere inside all of that, the shape of my life no longer fits.

Grief is not memory. It’s interruption. It enters sideways. A sound. A texture. A movement that once meant nothing, now unbearable. You don't see it coming. You recognize it only by the damage it’s already done.

I don’t want comfort. I want recognition. I want the sentence he is gone to sound as impossible to others as it does to me. But it doesn’t. And so I learn to carry it silently, like smuggling something sacred through a world that has forgotten how to name it.

What I miss isn’t just his voice. It’s the weight of being responsible for someone you love. The everyday gravity of it. That specific tether. And without it, there’s a kind of unmooring—not dramatic, just wrong.

I still reach. My hands move faster than my understanding. I still pause, as if he might walk in. I still whisper to a room that hasn’t changed, hoping the air will carry something back.

One month. And nothing inside me has resolved.

This isn’t healing. This is exposure.
And I am still standing in it, without skin.

There’s a story people expect grief to follow. That it deepens. Teaches. That over time it settles into something manageable.

That is not what’s happening here.

What’s happening is repetition. The body keeps acting like I still live in the same world. I wake up. I dress. I feed the dog. I respond to things. But I’m not inside those actions. I’m moving through them like an echo of myself.

Grief doesn’t unfold. It returns.

A voice. A line from nowhere. A shift in temperature that mirrors a moment I didn’t know I’d memorized. It hits without reason. There is no rhythm. No build. Just a snap. And I stop—without meaning to. Sometimes I cover it. Sometimes I don’t bother.

I’ve gotten good at nodding. At finishing sentences I don’t believe in. At letting the silence stretch half a beat longer before I speak, just to keep from lying. But even that’s a kind of performance.

What I want is not relief. Not even understanding.

I want proximity.

Not to the pain—to him.

If I could stay near, even through the hurt, I would. If I could preserve the weight exactly as it is now—tight in the chest, constant in the spine—I’d carry it gladly. Because it’s the only proof I have left that he was real. That I was.

People say it will fade. That one day I’ll breathe easier.

But that’s what I fear.

Because that’s the second death.

And I don’t know what I’ll become if I let that one happen too.

I don’t mark the days.

I know it’s been a month. I know which day it was. But I don’t count forward from it. That kind of measurement feels beside the point—like trying to track the depth of a well by tossing a stone and waiting for the sound.

What I feel doesn’t track with time.

There are stretches where I move freely, speak clearly, remember how to answer questions. And then something breaks—nothing visible—and I’m somewhere else. Not lost. Just… displaced. Watching my own life arrive without me.

He’s in all of it.

Even now, the world is still full of things he would have noticed. A phrase. A dog. Some strange turn of weather he’d find meaning in. And when they show up, they don’t pass quietly. They land like questions I can’t answer.

Sometimes I say his name just to hear it. Not loudly. Just enough to give it air.

There’s no comfort in it. No mysticism. It’s not a ritual. It’s not closure. It’s a refusal to let the sound disappear. A name isn’t supposed to outlive the person. And yet I keep saying it. Like that might slow the separation.

I know he’s gone.

Not lost. Not missing. Gone. That word has its own weight now. It doesn’t echo. It lands. Flat. Cold. Absolute.

But inside that fact is another one: I am still here.

And that part, I haven’t figured out yet.

What it means to keep moving inside a world that no longer includes him. What it means to speak, to work, to answer messages, to hold a fork, to pay bills, to do any of it without fracture. Without apology. Without feeling like I’ve abandoned something that should still be present.

Because the grief doesn’t ask me to stop.

It asks me not to forget.

There are things I will never forgive the world for.

Not because it meant harm. Because it didn’t care. Because it kept turning while I held my son’s death in both hands and tried to understand how to go on living around it.

The body adapts. That’s its betrayal.

I wake up. I drive. I speak. And none of it feels earned. I’ve become fluent in the language of functioning, but every sentence carries something behind it. And that thing has no name. Only weight.

What I want—what I can’t say out loud—is that I would trade all of this. The words. The clarity. The survival. I would give it back if it meant he could still be here.

Not healed. Not saved. Just here.

Just alive enough to text me something strange at 2 a.m. Just alive enough to be angry. To be quiet. To be tired. To be held. To be real.

I think the worst part is knowing that love wasn’t the problem.

I loved him fully. I showed up. I fought for him. And still, it wasn’t enough. Not because I failed. But because some systems are stronger than the people inside them.

And now the world wants me to carry this with grace.

But there is no grace in this. Only persistence. Only the refusal to forget.

So I write. Not because I want to explain it. But because I can’t let silence be the final witness.

Gage was here.

And I will not let the world return to normal without remembering that something extraordinary has been taken from it.