You're Going To Die Anyway
About the people most of us have already lost
The chairs are arranged in a circle because it was deemed less clinical than rows. It isn’t. It just means you can see everybody’s face when they cry, and they can see yours.
There are six of them tonight. There’s always coffee, the bad kind from a machine in the hallway, and someone always brings something — tonight it’s Carol, who set a box of grocery store cookies on the table without saying anything about it, the way people do when they want to contribute but don’t want to make it a thing.
The facilitator’s name is Beth. She has a yellow legal pad that she never writes on. She lets the silences run longer than she feels comfortable, which is either a therapeutic technique or just her personality.
Carol is sixty-three, and she lost her husband Ron eleven months ago.
She talks about Ron the way you talk about weather you lived through — just factually, because the facts are dramatic enough on their own. Thirty-eight years; two kids. A house in Chesterfield with a garage he was always going to clean out, boxes stacked floor to ceiling since 1987, because there was always something more urgent.
“He was going to retire in March,” she says. “We had a trip planned. Portugal. Neither of us had ever been to Portugal. He kept saying we’d go somewhere warm and just sit. Just sit and do nothing for two weeks. He said that so many times I can hear him saying it.”
She looks at the cookie box, but doesn’t take one.
“He died in January. Two months before. I keep thinking about that. Two months.”
She says it without bitterness. That’s the thing about Carol — there’s no anger in her, just this kind of bewildered arithmetic, like she’s still working out where the numbers went wrong.
“He had a list. An actual list, on a yellow pad. Things we were going to do. Places. I found it in his desk when I was going through things.”
She pauses.
“Portugal was number one. It was always number one.”
Dave is fifty-one, and he lost his brother Kenny two years ago.
Kenny was forty-seven, had a heart attack on a Tuesday morning, no warning, no drama, just there and then not there anymore. Dave talks about him with his hands, gesturing at something just to the right of where he’s sitting, like Kenny is almost in the room.
“Kenny had played guitar since he was twelve. Not as a hobby — as a thing, the way some people have a thing that’s just obviously what they are. He’d played in bands through his twenties, recorded a few songs in someone’s basement, had a voice that made strangers go quiet. Then he’d gotten a real job, then a wife, then a mortgage, then kids, then the years started doing what years do,” Dave starts pouring it all out.
“He had all these songs; I found notebooks full of them. Lyrics, chords, all of it. Some of them were — I don’t know music, I can’t really judge, but they felt like something. You know what I mean? They felt like actual something.”
He stops.
“He kept saying he was going to record properly. Get the time, get the equipment, do it right. He said that for about fifteen years.”
Dave laughs; a short, uncomfortable laugh.
“His youngest is ten, and she has never heard him play, imagine that. He was always going to do a family night, teach her some chords. Always going to.”
He looks at his hands.
“I bought her a guitar for Christmas—a nice one. I don’t know why. It felt like something I had to do.”
Patrice is forty-four, and she lost her mother, Gloria, eighteen months ago.
Gloria had raised three kids mostly alone, worked two jobs through most of Patrice’s childhood, the kind of tirelessness that stops being impressive and becomes just the texture of a person. She’d put everyone else’s life first, so automatically it had never even seemed like a choice.
“She had a list too,” Patrice says, glancing at Carol with something like recognition. “Not written down — in her head. Things she was going to do once we were grown. Travel. She always said Italy, specifically Italy; she had a thing about Italy. She was going to take a painting class. She showed me a flyer once, years ago. Adult art class at the community center. Seven dollars a session.”
Patrice’s voice stays even. She’s clearly said this before, to herself, in the car.
“We grew up. She didn’t do any of it. There was always something — money, or she was tired, or one of us needed something. And then she got sick. And she didn’t get better.”
She looks at Beth.
“I signed up for a painting class three months after the funeral. In the first session, I just sat there and cried for an hour. The teacher was very nice about it.”
She almost smiles.
“I’m actually getting okay at it. She would’ve been better. She had that kind of eye.”
Tim is 48, and he lost his best friend, Paul, four years ago.
He talks about Paul the way men talk about other men they loved, without ever using the word — circling it, touching its edges, describing the shape of the thing without naming it directly. They’d been friends since college—the kind of friendship where you don’t talk for three months and then pick up mid-sentence.
Tim started to say that Paul had always been going to quit his job and do something that mattered. He’d said it since they were twenty-two, sitting in Tim’s apartment eating cereal for dinner, the whole world theoretically available to them. He’d said it at thirty, at the five-year reunion, with more urgency. At forty, at Paul’s kitchen table while his kids slept upstairs, with something that was starting to sound less like a plan and more like a wound.
“Last time I saw him, three weeks before,” Tim says, “we had dinner—just the two of us, which we hadn’t done in a while. And at the end of the night, he said it again. ‘One day, Timmy. One day I’m going to blow the whole thing up and actually live.’ And I said, ‘I know, buddy.’ Because I’d been saying I know for twenty years.”
He stops.
“I didn’t take him seriously. That’s the thing. I loved him completely, and I didn’t take him seriously. I thought there was more time for him to get around to it.”
He picks up his coffee cup, finds it empty, and puts it down.
“There wasn’t.”
Ashley is 29, and she lost her college roommate, Jess, three years ago. Car accident, sophomore year of grad school. The kind of thing that happens to other people until it happens to someone who sat across from you at breakfast for two years.
Ashley is the youngest in the group, and she carries it differently than the others — with a kind of raw alertness, like she’s still surprised by it in ambush moments.
“Jess had been going to change things,” Ashley says this plainly, as a statement of observable fact. “She’d had the mind for it, the specific combination of intelligence and fury and focus that occasionally actually moves the needle on things. She’d had plans — not vague aspirations, actual plans, with timelines and steps, written in a notebook she carried everywhere.”
“She knew what she wanted to do,” Ashley continues. “That was the thing. Most people don’t, right? Most people spend years figuring it out, but Jess…Jess already knew. She’d known since she was like seventeen. She had it all mapped out.”
She looks at the circle.
“Sometimes that makes it worse, I think. If she’d been uncertain, if she’d been still figuring it out — I don’t know. But she knew. She had the whole thing ready. She just didn’t get to do it.”
She’s quiet for a moment.
“I get angry sometimes. Not at anything specific. Just angry. Is that still normal, three years out?”
Beth nods. Yes, still normal.
“I think I’m angry because she was so ready,” Ashley says. “She did everything right. She was ready, and it didn’t matter.”
The sixth person in the circle is named Kyle.
Kyle is thirty-four. He’s been coming for seven weeks. He brings the good coffee sometimes, the stuff from the place on Maple, without announcing it. He listens the way certain people listen — completely, without the slight distraction of waiting for his turn to speak. He makes eye contact, he laughs at the right moments, the small dark laughs that grief groups develop as a kind of pressure valve.
He has never said who he lost.
When Beth has gently raised it in previous weeks, he’s said “not yet” in a way that doesn’t invite follow-up, and the group has left it there because it understands that people arrive at their own time and cannot be moved before then. They’ve come to think of him as the quiet one. The good listener. The guy who brings coffee.
Tonight, Beth glances at the clock. Last session before a six-week break. She looks at Kyle.
“Kyle.”
He looks up.
“If you’re ready.”
The room holds itself still. Carol has her hands folded in her lap. Dave stops turning his empty cup. Patrice, Tim, and Ashley — all of them turned toward Kyle with the particular gentleness of people who know what it costs to start talking.
Kyle looks at his hands for a long moment.
Then he starts.
“He was twenty-six when I lost him. Twenty-six, which sounds young, and it was,” he says.
He pauses, voice is steady.
“He wanted to write. Had been wanting to since he was a teenager; had notebooks full of starts — stories, ideas, the beginnings of things. He had a novel he’d been working on for two years. Not finished, but close. Or he kept saying close.”
He stops. Starts again.
“He wanted to travel. Not the Instagram kind — he wanted to actually go somewhere and stay, learn how a place worked, not just photograph it. He had a list of cities. He kept adding to it.”
“He was going to do all of it,” Kyle says. “He was absolutely going to do all of it. He had a plan. And the plan kept being very nearly ready to start. There was always one more thing to sort out first. Money, or timing, or circumstances. Always something to stabilize before the actual life could begin.”
He looks up.
“I lost him on a Wednesday. His name was Kyle. I just…looked up one day and I…he was gone. The guy who was going to write the novel and live in four different cities and actually start the life he’d been planning. Gone. And in his place, there was just me. Doing the safe thing. The sensible thing. The thing that kept the lights on and required the least amount of courage.”
His voice doesn’t break; if anything, it gets quieter.
“I’m thirty-four now. He’d be horrified. Not at anything specific — just at the gap. Between what I said I was going to do and what I’ve done. He was so certain it was all going to happen. The certainty was the whole thing. He was just waiting for the right moment.”
Kyle looks at the circle.
Nobody speaks.
The machine in the hallway hums. Outside, a car goes past.
Then Dave makes a sound — short, low, the sound of someone recognizing something they didn’t expect to see. Not a laugh exactly, but more like the noise you make when you realize you’ve been holding your breath for way too long.
“Christ,” he says quietly. “I’ve been coming here for eight months.”
He looks around the circle. So does Patrice. Something behind her eyes, quick and private. So does Ashley, who is very still. So does Tim, who is now looking at his hands, as Kyle did a moment ago.
Carol says nothing. She reaches over and takes Kyle’s hand, and the gesture contains something the rest of the session hasn’t.
Beth closes her yellow legal pad.
“Same time in six weeks?”
Oof. This one had me by the guts. Makes me very glad to be 41 and doing the thing.
I think it's sad that so many people postpone living. I know I have. And why? There isn't any good reason. You really cut right down to that uncomfortable truth.