My neighbor is fighting cancer. She is a wife and mother to a fifteen-year-old girl and a nine-year-old boy. She goes for treatment several times a week, and her body is shrinking under the weight of survival. Seeing her the other day felt disorienting, not because I don’t believe it’s happening, but because some part of me has been here before.

Death touched my life early. When it did, it did not just take; it taught… not gently or cleanly, but permanently. When my father died, I learned how to live differently. More honestly and bravely, sometimes truly, with more grace. I also learned something no one prepares you for: time does not heal in the way people promise. 

Time keeps moving on the clock, but grief does not always follow. It settles into the body. It waits and resurfaces when something familiar knocks.

Watching my neighbor now, I feel it all again, as if the clock had never moved. I once wrote that loss didn’t simply interrupt my life; it shaped it. It didn’t only take… it showed me urgency. Adventure and travel taught me to say yes and that “someday” is a dangerous illusion. Death taught me to stop waiting. Say yes and live out loud.

It also taught me boldness. Death stripped away the belief that tomorrow is promised. It taught me to send the text, say what I feel, love openly, and ask for what I want. Stop rehearsing a life that might never arrive.

And yet, alongside that clarity… the pain remains; that’s the part no one really explains.

You can do the work, write the book to make sense of the situation and untangle family systems, while stopping the cycle of carrying what was never yours to hold. Still, when death enters the room again, your nervous system remembers exactly when and who, and it takes you back to the time of trauma and guttural sadness.

At eleven years old, I learned that when someone dies, everything reorganizes. Adults falter. Children adapt, both unconsciously and consciously. Strength becomes a requirement, not a choice. So when I see my neighbor’s children, I don’t just see courage; I see the quiet cost of growing up amid uncertainty.

There is very little I can do to change the outcome of her illness. I cannot fix it. I cannot soften it. I cannot protect her children from what they may learn too soon. All I can do, at this point, is show up on Fridays with flowers, becoming the flower fairy, hoping to brighten her day in whatever small way possible. It feels almost insignificant against the enormity of what she’s facing. And yet, it feels honest.

My years as a hospice patient care volunteer have prepared me to step in and do more. Now I’m learning that care doesn’t always require immediate action …it can also look like discernment: flowers, presence via text, and staying close without imposing myself. That, too, is something loss taught me. Presence matters…small gestures matter. Love doesn’t need to be grand to be real.

Death takes so much, but it also teaches. It teaches how to live, how to love, and, most recently for me, how to stop fighting battles that steal peace. My favorite has always been communicating honestly, even when honesty fractures what can no longer hold. I’ve learned that peace is not the absence of pain but the absence of pretending. And sometimes peace arrives only after we stop asking grief in all its forms to hurry up and leave.

In the end, time may keep moving, but the body remembers.

Standing at my neighbor’s iron-gray gate, flowers of the week in hand, I understand this: I am not broken because it still hurts. I am human. Loss taught me how to live and left a scar that knows when death is near. Both are true.

I am proud of who I continue to become: a woman who told the truth, who left the table when it could no longer hold it, and who is still learning how to live with urgency, with love, and with a heart that remembers. 

I am not finished. I am still recalibrating.