My grandfather said something to me when I was twenty that I did not understand until I was eighty. He said, “The worst punishment is not death. The worst punishment is living when everyone you loved has died.”
I thought he was being dramatic. Old people say dark things sometimes. I nodded and forgot about it.
Now I am eighty-three. Now I understand.
My father died first. I was forty-two. It was expected—he was old, he was sick, we had time to prepare. I cried at the funeral and then I recovered. Life continued. I still had my mother, my wife, my friends. Grief was a visitor, not a resident.
My mother followed five years later. This was harder. With her death, my childhood lost its last witness. She was the only person alive who remembered me as a baby, who knew the songs she sang to put me to sleep, who could tell me stories about my first words. When she died, that entire archive of my earliest self disappeared.
I began to understand what my grandfather meant.
Then the friends started leaving. Karim, who I had known since school. We had shared fifty years of jokes, arguments, confidences. He knew things about me that I had never told anyone else. When he died, those things became secrets again—but secrets with no one left to keep them.
Rashid went next. Then Jamal. Then Shafiq. One by one, the people who had witnessed my youth, who could remember the young man I used to be, who could say “remember when we…”—they all left. Each death took not just a person but a portion of my history.
My wife died three years ago. We had been married fifty-one years. She was the last person who knew my daily self—my habits, my moods, my small preferences. She knew I liked my tea too hot. She knew I talked in my sleep. She knew which memories made me laugh and which ones I could not speak about. When she died, I became unknowable. There is no one left alive who truly knows me.
This is what my grandfather was trying to explain. Not the grief of losing one person, but the accumulation of losses until you stand alone, the last keeper of memories that no one else can verify.
I look at photographs now and there is no one to confirm what I see. “That was the day we went to Cox’s Bazar,” I say to myself. But was it? Without someone else who was there, memory becomes uncertain. I am the only testimony, and testimony without corroboration feels like invention.
The cruelest part is not the absence. I have learned to live with absence. The cruelest part is that joy has no one to receive it.
Last month I saw a bird in my garden—beautiful, unusual, a species I had never seen before. My first instinct was to call my wife. Then I remembered. The bird was still beautiful, but the beauty had nowhere to go. It stayed inside me with no exit.
This happens constantly. I read something interesting and want to share it. I remember a funny story and want to tell it. I feel grateful and want to express it. But there is no one left who cares about my interests, my stories, my gratitude. I have become a closed circuit. Everything happens inside and nothing flows out.
People tell me to make new friends. They mean well. But they do not understand that friendship at eighty is different from friendship at thirty. I can meet new people, yes. I can have pleasant conversations. But I cannot build the kind of friendship that takes decades to create. I do not have decades. And new friends do not know my past. They know only the old man I am now, not the full person I was.
There is a specific loneliness in being the last one. Not just missing people, but missing being known. I carry so much that no one else remembers. My father’s laugh. My mother’s way of scolding. My wife’s particular silence when she was thinking. The inside jokes with friends that would make no sense to anyone else. All of this lives only in me now. When I die, it dies.
Perhaps this is my purpose now. Not living for myself—I have little left to want for myself—but living as a vessel for what others left behind. I am the last library. The last archive. The only remaining evidence that these people existed and mattered.
I have started writing things down. Not for anyone to read, necessarily. Just to make the memories solid. My mother’s recipe for khichuri, which she never wrote down but I can still taste. The way my father cleared his throat before saying something important. The exact words my wife said on our wedding night—words I have never told anyone.
I write these things because putting them on paper feels like keeping the dead alive a little longer. As long as the words exist, something of them exists. When I die and someone finds these pages, perhaps they will know that Rahima made the best khichuri in Dhaka, and that Mahmud always cleared his throat, and that Fatima said something beautiful once that deserved to be remembered.
I am learning, slowly, that being alone and being lonely are not the same thing. I am alone—that is simply a fact now. But loneliness is a feeling, and feelings can be managed.
Some days I am desperately lonely. Some days the silence of my apartment feels like burial. Some days I talk to my wife as if she were still here, and then stop, embarrassed at my own foolishness.
But other days, I am simply alone. Quiet. At peace with the emptiness. I sit with my tea and I think about the people I have loved, and I feel them nearby even though they are nowhere. Their love did not leave with them. It stayed. It lives in me. It is the reason I am still here.
My grandfather was right that living alone is a kind of punishment. But he did not tell me the rest. He did not tell me that the punishment contains its own grace. That being the last one left means being the keeper of everyone’s story. That carrying the dead is heavy but also holy.
I will not be here much longer. The body knows when it is winding down. When I go, I will take so much with me—so many voices and faces and moments that no one else remembers.
But for now, I am still here. The last witness. The final archive. The one who remembers.
And remembering, it turns out, is a form of love.
Perhaps the only form that never dies.