The sparrow outside my window builds its nest with the focused intensity of someone who believes tomorrow will come indefinitely. I watch it weave twigs and string into a perfect circle, driven by instincts that assume continuity, preparing for a future it cannot imagine ending.
I envy that sparrow.
This morning, Arash found a dead beetle on the balcony and asked me why it stopped moving. As I tried to explain death to someone who has never truly grasped that he himself will stop moving someday, I was struck by the peculiar burden of human consciousness: we are the only creatures who must live with the knowledge of our own extinction.
Every other living thing dies, but only we know we will die. Only we must build our lives on the foundation of inevitable ending. Only we must love people we know we will lose, invest in futures we will not see, create meaning while knowing that meaning is temporary.
This knowledge changes everything about how we exist in the world.
I think about how different my relationship with Happy would be if I didn’t know that one of us will someday have to live without the other. Would I appreciate her morning coffee ritual as much if I couldn’t imagine a time when that chair would be empty? Would I pay such close attention to the way she hums while arranging her flowers if I wasn’t aware that silence will eventually reclaim our home?
Mortality consciousness doesn’t just add weight to our experiences—it creates the conditions under which love becomes both possible and urgent. We love fiercely precisely because we know love is temporary. We treasure moments precisely because we understand that moments pass.
But this knowledge also isolates us in ways that are difficult to articulate. When I try to explain to Arash why I sometimes look at him with such intensity, how can I tell him that I’m memorizing his face because I know there will come a day when memory is all I have left of this version of him? How do I explain that every bedtime story carries weight because I’m aware of how few bedtime stories any parent gets to tell?
We live surrounded by beings who share our mortality but not our awareness of it. The plants Happy tends will wither and die, but they don’t wake up in the middle of the night wondering when their last spring will arrive. The stray cat that visits our balcony will eventually grow old and weak, but it doesn’t spend its healthy days contemplating the approach of frailty.
Only we carry this double burden: we must die, and we must know we will die.
This awareness creates a unique form of existential loneliness. We are conscious beings floating on a thin layer of life wrapped around a rock spinning through infinite darkness, and we’re the only species that can comprehend the fragility of our situation. We know that our planet will eventually be consumed by our aging sun, that our universe is expanding toward cold entropy, that everything we build and love and hope for exists in the brief warm moment between cosmic events too vast for us to truly grasp.
And we must live normal lives with this knowledge.
I remember the night my mother died, sitting in the hospital corridor at 3 AM, watching nurses move through their routines of care and documentation. They had done this thousands of times—witnessed the transition from life to death, comforted families, processed the paperwork of ending. But in that moment, surrounded by people who dealt professionally with mortality, I felt more alone than I ever had before.
Because even among people who work with death daily, each person must face their own mortality in complete solitude. No one can die your death for you. No one can share that final transition. In the end, consciousness is extinguished one person at a time, privately, individually, alone.
This is the loneliness that no amount of love or community can fully address. Happy can hold my hand, Arash can depend on me, friends can offer support and understanding, but none of them can know my death the way I must know it—as the horizon line of my own consciousness, the point where my story stops.
Yet here’s what I’m learning: this uniquely human loneliness might also be what makes us uniquely human in our capacity for connection. Because we know death is coming, we reach for each other with a desperation and tenderness that immortal beings might never develop. Because we understand the temporary nature of consciousness, we work to create bridges between individual minds—through art, through love, through the simple act of trying to communicate our inner experience to another person who faces the same ultimate isolation.
Maybe this is why we tell stories, why we make music, why we reach for each other across the darkness of individual consciousness. Not because we can overcome the fundamental solitude of mortal awareness, but because we can acknowledge it together. We can sit side by side in our separate knowings of death and find comfort not in solving the problem but in sharing it.
The sparrow finishes its nest and flies away, returning periodically with food for purposes I can only guess at. It lives fully in the present tense because it has no choice. It cannot imagine its own non-existence, cannot plan for a future it knows it will not see, cannot love with the intensity that comes from knowing love is finite.
But we can. And we do.
This morning, after explaining death to Arash as gently as I could, I watched him process this information with the resilience that children bring to impossible truths. He was quiet for a long time, then asked if we could make pancakes. Death became real to him for a moment, then receded back into the abstract future where children keep all unbearable knowledge until they’re old enough to carry it.
Someday he will understand what I understand now—that we are alone in our awareness of ending, that consciousness comes with the price of knowing consciousness will end, that love is made more precious and more painful by our knowledge of loss.
But maybe by then he will also understand what I’m beginning to glimpse: that this loneliness is not a flaw in the design of human existence but the source of everything that makes human existence beautiful. Our awareness of death creates the urgency that makes us reach for life. Our knowledge of ending creates the poignancy that makes moments matter. Our understanding of loss creates the desperation that makes us love so completely.
We are the only species that knows it will die, and perhaps that makes us the only species that truly knows how to live.
Tonight, I’ll sit on this balcony and watch the evening settle over the city. I’ll think about all the people in all the windows, each carrying their own private knowledge of mortality, each finding their own ways to love and create and hope despite knowing how the story ends.
And in that shared solitude, that common loneliness, that universal awareness of temporary consciousness, I’ll find what comfort there is to be found: we may be alone in our knowing, but we are not alone in our aloneness. We face the darkness individually, but we face it together, and perhaps that is enough.
