Tomorrow Never Came
For the past few weeks, I have been carrying around thoughts that I haven’t known what to do with. They sit quietly during the day and grow louder at night. I think the only way I can make sense of them is to write them down.
In the last two weeks, I heard about two deaths in my family.
Neither loss was of someone I spoke to every day. Neither was a person I would have called my closest confidant. Yet both deaths affected me more than I expected. They left me with questions I cannot answer and fears I cannot easily calm.
The people who died were part of my life in a way that is difficult to explain. They were simply there. I grew up seeing them at family gatherings, hearing their voices, watching them laugh, and listening to conversations around them. They were familiar faces in the landscape of my life, people I never imagined would suddenly be gone.
And now they are.
I don’t know if I miss them because we were close or because they were part of the world as I knew it. Maybe it is both.
What makes it even harder is that I am close to their children, my cousins. They are not really cousins in my mind anymore. They are more like sisters. They are people I grew up with, people I care deeply about, people whose happiness and pain matter to me.
I’ve always avoided death. Funerals, hospitals, and anything that reminded me of life’s ending made me uncomfortable. I preferred to stay away from it all, as if distance could somehow protect me from reality.
This time, I couldn’t stay away.
I stood in front of someone I had seen laughing, talking, and living. Someone I had spoken to. Someone whose presence I had taken for granted.
And there they were, lying still.
No movement.
No voice.
No open eyes.
All I could think was, This isn’t real.
My mind refused to accept what was right in front of me. How could somebody who existed so fully one day simply not be there the next?
The first news I received was about my uncle, my father’s younger brother.
He passed away unexpectedly.
No warning.
No long illness.
No final conversation.
He went to sleep one night and never woke up again.
What makes it even harder to process is that nobody was with him when it happened. His wife wasn’t there. His children weren’t there. Nobody in the house was there.
He died alone.
That thought unsettles me more than I know how to explain.
Ever since then, my mind has been asking terrifying questions.
What if it were my father?
What if it were my mother?
What if tomorrow morning I woke up and one of them wasn’t breathing?
What would I do?
Would I know how to handle it?
Would I survive something like that emotionally?
I don’t know.
The truth is, I still wake up with those fears.
What hurt most was not only watching people grieve but also watching them live with regret.
One of my cousins is supposed to get married next year. Instead of looking forward to that day, she now carries the pain of wishing her father could be there to see it.
My own father had planned to call his younger brother. He thought he would call tomorrow.
Tomorrow never came.
Instead, it brought the news that his little brother had died.
That thought has stayed with me.
How many conversations do we postpone because we believe there will always be another day?
How many people do we assume will still be there next week, next month, next year?
Watching my family fall apart in front of me was one of the most painful things I have ever witnessed.
These were people I had always seen smiling, laughing, arguing, eating together, and living together.
Then suddenly, everything changed.
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No words felt sufficient.
No comfort felt adequate.
People say, “It’s going to be okay.”
But sometimes it isn’t okay.
Sometimes people lose a piece of their life that can never be replaced.
A day or two later, another piece of news arrived.
One of my other relatives was in the hospital, fighting for life.
My aunt.
Her husband, my uncle, had already passed away years ago. They have a child, and that child is now the only thing left of that family unit.
Once again, fear found its way into my mind.
I started thinking about distance.
I live thousands of miles away from many of the people I love.
What if something like this happened to me?
What if something happened to my parents?
Who would be there?
Who would I call?
Who would sit beside me?
Who would I lean on?
The hardest part of all this is admitting something I don’t often say out loud.
I feel lonely.
I don’t really have friends I can turn to.
I don’t have many people I can call in the middle of the night when life becomes too heavy.
And because of that, death doesn’t just frighten me because it represents loss.
It frightens me because it forces me to think about being alone.
As an only child, that fear feels especially real.
Who will I lean on when life becomes unbearable?
Who will lean on me?
What happens when the people who have always been my safety net are no longer there?
I know that nothing in life is permanent.
People change.
Relationships change.
Circumstances change.
Eventually, everything changes.
Knowing that doesn’t make it easier.
If anything, it makes it harder.
The fear is valid.
The fear is real.
And it is terrifying.
I still don’t know whether these thoughts make complete sense. I don’t know whether writing them down achieves anything.
But maybe someone, somewhere, has lain awake at night asking the same questions.
Maybe someone else has felt the same dread after losing a loved one.
Maybe someone else has wondered how they would survive without the people they depend on.
If that’s true, then perhaps this is worth sharing.
Not because I have answers.
But because sometimes it helps to know that you are not the only person carrying these fears.
And sometimes, that small comfort is enough to help us get through another day.
