When one dies, what we forget
When a person dies,
what remains is not a body of answers,
but the shape of their passing—
the things they did,
the words they left in the air,
the faint perfume of their presence
caught in a room,
in a coat sleeve,
in the memory of a doorway.
And whether those traces were kind
or cruel,
whether they warmed a life
or left it colder,
they cannot be gathered back.
No hand reaches through the dark
to take a sentence back.
No apology arrives in time
to mend what has already been made.
So the living are left
with the weightless things
that weigh the most:
a compliment that saved someone,
a lie that followed them for years,
a silence that should have been a comfort,
a kindness that outlived the one who gave it,
a wound that still speaks
long after the speaker is gone.
I believe through the pain
that can never forget,
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until there comes wisdom
through the awful grace of God.
You cannot carry on
as if the ledger were empty.
For the good you did,
you will have to remember it.
For the harm you caused,
you will have to live beside it.
And in the morning,
when the mirror gives you back your face,
you will have to meet it honestly—
not with perfection,
but with the difficult grace
of someone who knows
that being human means leaving traces.
There is a lesson here,
quiet as dust on a windowsill:
words have no physical weight,
and yet they can bend a life.
Deeds can vanish from sight
and still remain,
like smoke in the curtains,
like salt in the wound,
like light in the bones.
So choose carefully
what you place into the world.
For what you give away
does not disappear.
It becomes the air others breathe,
the memory they keep,
the unseen current
that carries them forward
or holds them back.