What I Never Said Loud Enough

This is for the person who is dying and knows it and has to sit at dinner with people who are pretending they don't. And for the people at the dinner who are pretending they don't because saying it out loud would make the pasta taste like goodbye. Dying is not the hard part. Dying is just the body closing the accounts. The hard part is the living you do while you know— the coffee that still tastes good, the dog that still needs walking, the morning that arrives with the indecency to be beautiful. Someone is reading this right now and they know. They know the exact weight of a prognosis and the exact way the doctor looked away before saying the word. I want to say something useful. I want to say something that matters. But the only honest thing is this: I don't know what it's like. I'm not going to pretend. But I know that you are still here, reading this, which means you are still choosing mornings. And that is not small. The world doesn't know what to do with you. The cards all say wrong things. The pamphlets are useless. Everyone hugs too hard or not hard enough. But this poem knows: you are brave and you are scared and you are both at exactly the same time and that is the most human thing there is.