Death: Losing Our Loves

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, lovers and seekers, those who are lost, and those who are found.

Tonight, I will be reading from the compilation titled Outlaw Creative (the geometry of life).

We will be hearing from the chapter titled, Death: Losing Our Loves.

That being said, let's get started, shall we?

Death: Losing Our Loves.

We do not lose people the way we lose keys.

That is the first lie grief has to undo.

Keys disappear into couches and pockets. They are misplaced. Found again. Recovered. The word lose works there because the object is separable from the self. It can be absent without altering the architecture of the person who misplaced it.

But when someone dies—when a mother, a friend, a cat who knew the shape of the house, a dog who understood the grammar of your footsteps leaves the world—nothing has been misplaced. Something has been removed. And removal changes the load-bearing structure.

That is what death does. It subtracts a presence that had been doing quiet work.

And only after the work stops do we notice how much was being held.

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One: Death Is Not an Event. It Is a Reorganization.

We speak of death as if it happens at a moment: a phone call, a hospital room, a timestamp. But that is only when the news arrives. The real work of death is not punctual. It is architectural.

A mother dies, and suddenly the past rearranges itself. Stories that once lived safely in “later” become urgent. Questions you never asked harden into permanent shapes. The future thins out, because one of the witnesses to your becoming is gone.

A cat dies, and the house changes temperature. The silence learns new paths. You realize how many decisions were being made in consultation with a small, watching creature: when to sit, when to stay, when to be still.

A dog remains, and grief gains a body. Dogs do not philosophize loss, but they register absence with devastating accuracy. They wait. They check. They look at you differently—not accusingly, but as if you might be the last remaining map.

Death reorganizes the living.

That is why it exhausts us.

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Two: Loving Makes You Vulnerable to Time.

We like to imagine love as something timeless. Eternal. Immune.

It is not.

Love is an agreement with time that says: I will attach anyway.

Every bond is a wager against entropy. Every affection is a decision to invest in something that will not remain intact. Even if no one dies young, even if everything unfolds “in order,” love guarantees loss because it guarantees change.

This is not tragic. It is structural.

If you love nothing, you lose nothing. But you also become nothing—thin, unmarked, unburdened, and uninhabited.

The cost of love is grief.

The reward of love is having been changed.

And the change does not revert when the loved one dies.

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Three: We Do Not Grieve Who They Were. We Grieve Who We Were With Them.

This is one of the harder truths, and one of the gentler ones.

When Jennifer loses her mother, she does not only lose a person. She loses a version of herself that existed only in that relationship: the daughter-self. The one who could still be seen through a particular lens, forgiven in a particular register, recognized without explanation.

When Frieda the cat dies, something else goes with her: the part of the house that was for her. The tone of evenings. The sense of being observed by a small, sovereign intelligence that chose that home.

We grieve not just the dead, but the contexts they made possible.

That is why grief feels disorienting. It is not only sadness; it is identity loss.

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Four: Animals Teach Us a Cleaner Grammar of Death.

Humans talk too much around death.

We explain. We narrate. We soften. We offer meaning where there may be none. Animals do not do this. And that is why their deaths hurt in a particular way: they do not come wrapped in story.

A cat does not die symbolically. A dog does not pass with lessons. They simply stop being present. And presence was the whole relationship.

That starkness is a gift.

Because it reminds us that love does not require justification. It requires attention.

Frieda did not need to be important to the world. She only needed to be important to the people and creatures who knew her rhythms. Joey did not need to understand death to feel its impact. He only needed to notice that someone was missing.

Animals grieve without bargaining. They do not try to turn loss into progress.

They show us that grief is not a problem to solve. It is a condition to inhabit.

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Five: Anticipatory Grief Is Still Grief.

There is a quieter sorrow that walks alongside all of this: the grief that has not yet been triggered by death, but by fragility.

A father falls. A body weakens. The word TIA enters the vocabulary. The future becomes conditional.

This kind of grief is strange because nothing has been “lost” yet. And yet something has already begun to recede: certainty, continuity, the illusion of time as a long, flat road.

Anticipatory grief is often dismissed because it feels premature. It is not.

It is love responding to risk.

It is the mind and body beginning the work of adaptation before the rupture arrives. And while it is exhausting, it is also evidence of care.

You do not brace for the fall of strangers.

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Six: There Is No Moral Hierarchy of Loss.

One of the cruelties of social grief is comparison.

A mother is more important than a cat.

A spouse is more important than a friend.

A long illness is worse than a sudden death.

These rankings are administrative, not emotional. They exist to help institutions function, not to describe reality.

Grief does not obey hierarchy. It obeys attachment.

A cat who watched you through long nights may carry more psychic weight than a relative who never learned your interior weather. A friend from decades ago may leave a deeper absence than someone more recently present.

This does not make anyone wrong.

It makes love specific.

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Seven: Grief Is the Proof That Something Worked.

There is a temptation to treat grief as evidence of failure: If only I had loved better. If only I had said more. If only I had known.

This is backwards.

Grief is not the sign that love failed. It is the sign that love took root.

You are not broken because you hurt.

You hurt because something mattered.

The pain does not mean you did it wrong.

The pain means you did it fully.

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Eight: Nothing Replaces the Dead. Some Things Continue Them.

One of the quieter violences done to the grieving is the insistence on replacement.

You’ll get another cat.

You’ll meet new people.

Life goes on.

Life does go on. But it does not do so by substitution.

Nothing replaces a specific love. What happens instead is continuation by influence. The dead shape how we speak, how we notice, how we hold others. They persist as orientation, not presence.

Frieda continues in how Jennifer notices quiet corners.

A mother continues in how a daughter evaluates safety and risk.

A father continues in how a son measures his own endurance.

This is not metaphor. It is inheritance.

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Nine: Grief Does Not Make You Smaller. It Makes You Deeper.

There is a fear that grief will hollow us out, make us less capable, less joyful, less alive.

In truth, grief deepens capacity. Not immediately. Not gently. But eventually.

Those who have lost learn to see edges more clearly. They recognize what matters faster. They become less impressed by cleverness and more attuned to seriousness without heaviness.

They learn patience—not as delay, but as presence under pressure.

They carry the dead not as weight, but as gravity.

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Ten: Love Is Not Proven by Survival.

We often speak of “being strong” in grief, as if endurance were the metric.

But love is not proven by how well you survive loss.

It is proven by how honestly you miss.

By how unwilling you are to flatten what was real into something manageable. By how you refuse to pretend that absence is neutral.

Missing is not weakness.

Missing is fidelity.

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Eleven: We Do Not Outgrow Our Dead. We Walk With Them Differently.

Time does not erase grief. It teaches us how to carry it without hemorrhaging.

The ache changes shape. The intensity modulates. The frequency shifts. But the connection does not dissolve.

You do not “move on” from those you loved.

You move forward with them, whether you consent to the phrasing or not.

They become part of your gait.

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Twelve: Death Does Not Get the Last Word. Love Already Spoke.

This is not a theological claim. It is an observable one.

Death ends presence. It does not undo impact.

Every act of love leaves residue. In habits. In reflexes. In values. In how we sit with others who are hurting.

Death interrupts, but it does not negate.

And that is why grief hurts so much: because the love is still active, still looking for its object.

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Thirteen: To Grieve Is to Refuse Erasure.

The world is very efficient at moving on.

Grief is an act of resistance.

It says: This mattered. This changed me. This will not be smoothed over.

To grieve openly is to refuse the lie that only the present counts.

It is to honor the dead not by mythologizing them, but by remembering accurately—with their textures, their limitations, their quirks, their ordinary holiness.

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Fourteen: What We Owe the Grieving.

We do not owe explanations.

We do not owe timelines.

We do not owe positivity.

What we owe the grieving is company.

To sit.

To listen.

To not rush the silence.

To allow the missing to be named without being solved.

This is harder than advice. It requires patience. And patience is rare.

But it is how love survives loss.

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Fifteen: In the End, Grief Is Love With Nowhere to Go.

And so it spills.

Into memory.

Into writing.

Into pauses.

Into fatigue.

Into unexpected tenderness.

Grief is not love’s opposite.

It is love’s afterlife.

And if we are brave enough to carry it without apology, it does not ruin us.

It makes us credible.