The Life You Planned, the Grief You Didn’t
There are things in life you will never be ready for. No matter how many times you think about them, how many times you have nightmares about them, or how often you witness them in other people’s lives and mistake empathy for understanding. Losing a parent is one of them.
It’s four in the morning where you live and early evening where your parents are. You are holding your phone, listening to your mom’s shaky voice as she says, “The biopsy results are back. I am not going to sugarcoat it; it’s not good.” And there is now a ceaseless alarm in your head going, “Oh my God. My dad is dying.”
You see people in the movies sitting in a doctor’s office, hearing devastating news about the health of their loved ones. You think you feel their pain. You get goosebumps thinking about how painful this moment could be. You empathize the best you can. But when you actually hear someone telling you, “There is nothing we can do, and all we can hope for is to manage his pain and let him live his life the best he can in the little time he has left,” you feel like a wrecking ball has gone through the centre of your body. For a moment or two, you try to see yourself floating on the ceiling of the doctor’s office, watching this as a scene in yet another movie. But no, you are the main character of this one. You are playing the role, and there is nowhere to escape.
Love is a peculiar thing. It can take as many shapes and forms as the number of situations people face in life. When you’re told you are going to lose someone you love in several months, everything about the way you love that person changes. You no longer can think about all the ways they have disappointed you in the past. Anything and everything about that relationship loses its meaning up to that point. You are facing a new set of emotions you never knew you had.
Your love becomes unconditional in the face of death. Because now there is something stronger than anything in life lurking in the corner. All you can do is try to grasp at every tiny moment, every bit and piece of memory, to score points in this battle you know you will lose.
You start telling other people that your dad is dying. You have to face their uneasiness and awkward reactions, as they don’t know what to say. What can be said? You can’t fault them for that. You find yourself nodding and telling other people, “Well, that’s life. What can you do?” As if it’s your duty to comfort the other person, when you are the one breaking inside. You hide behind the smile and you change the subject, because you don’t want to show people the darkness that’s looming inside of you. You barely understand it yourself.
There is a famous saying often attributed to Woody Allen. I know, don’t roll your eyes. I know we are not supposed to like him anymore. But what can I do? It’s a good quote. It says, “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” Nothing could describe more accurately the tornado that uprooted my life this year. On January 1, 2026, I had my whole year planned. I was supposed to finish the Writer’s Studio program, finish the first draft of my novel, start looking for an agent, and perfect my query letter. I was supposed to become more active, eat healthier, find writing buddies, hang out more with friends, read better books, and write like my life depended on it. Instead, I ended up living on the other side of the planet for four months, going through a war, and enduring one of the most difficult emotional battles of my life. There were moments I truly thought, “I will not make it. There is no way I will get out of this unscathed.” I still don’t know if I will.
I learned so much about grief and how we as humans try our best to handle it in the past few months. I will write more about this, but for now, I am just sharing my two cents. I know when we love someone and we see them in pain, we want to do everything we can to console them. We think we need to say something to take their pain away. But as I had to tell my mom in tears one night, “Some pains you can’t take away. This is one of them. I will have to carry it for the rest of my life, so stop trying to tell me it will get better. It won’t.”
Sitting here, in front of my computer, trying to put together a coherent post after five months, I still don’t know how much more time we have left with my dad. When I hugged his now fragile body and said goodbye to him last month, I didn’t know if I would ever see him again. I still don’t.
But I know one thing now. Life is not going to become easier after this. There is no clean ending to this kind of grief. No moment where you put it down and walk away unchanged. Of all the people I talked to, only one told me the truth: “It’s never going to go away. It’s never going to get easy. You just learn to live with it.”