Life doesn’t pause for death

The day my father died was nothing short of ordinary.

A Sunday afternoon in June, with gray skies hanging low, and the wind swirling lazily through the trees. Even the weather was unremarkable as if the world couldn’t be bothered to muster any dramatic flair for the occasion. I sat outside the ICU, staring at a half-eaten slice of cold Hawaiian pizza from our leftover lunch. The cheese had hardened, the pineapple tasted too sweet. It felt wrong, almost grotesque, to be chewing while my father’s body lay motionless just a few feet away, but I kept eating, almost as if the mechanical act of chewing could somehow ground me.

Minutes after he was declared dead, I was still sent to buy candles at the supermarket nearby.

I wandered the aisles in a daze. My father had just died, and here I was, standing in line, counting out change to pay for a pack of candles. Nothing about that moment made sense. I had imagined something far more dramatic, something out of a movie—the world slowing down, the clock pausing, the universe holding its breath out of respect for the man who had shaped my life. But there was no dramatic music, no grand gestures from the heavens. Just a dull ache in my chest, and the sound of the cashier’s monotone voice asking if I wanted a receipt.

Maybe that’s why it felt so wrong, so disturbingly normal. How could something so monumental happen on a day that felt so unremarkable? The wind still blew, the clouds still drifted lazily, and I still had to buy a pack of candles.

The silence that settled after they declared him gone was suffocating. I wanted someone to fill it, to tell me what came next. What should I do after this? But no one spoke—not even the gods I’d hoped for.

But even if the gods had shown themselves, my father was still dead. Nothing would have changed. He had stopped breathing. His hands, once strong enough to lift sacks of rice, could no longer lift a finger. It wasn’t him anymore, just a body—a shell, cold and vacant. When they draped the white cloth over him, it was like watching the earth cover him up forever. Soon enough, I thought, he would be a nutrient for other beings.

Looking back, perhaps I was just selfish. I was 16 when he left us, just a month shy of my 17th birthday. He will never know what college I went to or what my first job would be like. He will never see me have wrinkles or reach his age. He wouldn’t even see me graduate from high school.

Over time, my grief twisted into something else. At first, I was confused. Life has just thrown me a curve ball right to my face. Confusion then turned to frustration, then anger. People moved on so easily, I thought. On the first morning of the wake, condolences poured in. Not long after, everyone acted normally. I couldn’t understand how life could be so absurd. My father was gone, and yet the sun rose every morning, people still hurried to their jobs, the news anchor smiled as if the world hadn’t lost someone important. My neighbors were still throwing out the trash. When I saw my friends’ posts online, they were still dancing, and singing, laughing their hearts out. My father’s favorite show was still on—yet he was no longer there to watch it. It felt like a cruel joke—that life could go on without acknowledging the weight of my loss.

Days turned into weeks, and I found myself withdrawing. I no longer wanted to talk to my friends, their laughter felt like an insult to my pain. I couldn’t stand the normalcy around me. It felt as if the world was betraying my sorrow, moving on as though nothing had happened. But how could they? How could they laugh while my father’s absence was still so raw? Anger was my constant companion. I wasn’t angry at my father for leaving us—no, I was angry at the world for continuing. For moving on. I was angry at my friends for their smiles, at strangers for their lives. I wanted them to feel my grief, my confusion, my loss.

In the months and years that followed, I began to understand that grief isn’t linear; it has no clear beginning or end. In fact, it may never truly end. I had expected that one day I’d wake up and it would be gone—that time would heal all wounds, as people love to say. But no, grief just softens around the edges, becomes a part of your daily life, like an old scar. There will be moments when you feel their absence acutely, but you will learn to live with it, much like a quiet companion, one that you will eventually stop fighting. At some point, I stopped expecting the world to pause for me, stopped waiting for someone to give me permission to grieve. I gave myself that permission.

Looking back on that Sunday afternoon in June, I realize the weather wasn’t what mattered. It wasn’t about the gray skies or the wind that blew through the trees—it was about the silence that followed his last breath. I thought the quiet was an insult, a refusal to acknowledge what I had lost.

But maybe I was wrong. Maybe the world, in its own way, was offering me peace. The wind carried on because life carries on. It wasn’t that the universe didn’t care, it was trying to make me understand that life doesn’t pause for death.

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Rhea Rose Balaysoche, 22, grew up in a close-knit family in Taft, Eastern Samar. She is a fourth-year political science student at the University of the Philippines Tacloban.