Every person I love is traveling toward the same destination, and I cannot change their itinerary, cannot buy them different tickets, cannot even know when their train will arrive. My parents, my spouse, my son, my closest friends—all of them are temporary borrowings from the universe, gifts on loan for an unspecified period that will end without warning or appeal.
The math is brutal and non-negotiable: everyone gets born, everyone dies, everyone in between is a visitor in my life rather than a permanent resident. The people whose voices I most need to hear will someday fall silent. The hands I most need to hold will someday grow cold. The hearts that beat in rhythm with mine will someday stop entirely.
This knowledge sits in my chest like a stone, heavy with the weight of inevitable goodbye embedded in every hello. It makes every conversation potentially the last one, every hug possibly the final embrace, every ordinary Tuesday potentially the last ordinary Tuesday we’ll share.
But here’s the paradox that saves me from paralysis: this same arithmetic makes every moment infinitely precious. Because my son will not be eleven forever, because my parents will not live forever, because no relationship comes with guarantees of duration, each shared moment carries the weight of its own rarity.
The temporary nature of love doesn’t diminish its value—it concentrates it. The sunset is beautiful partly because it doesn’t last. The song moves us partly because it ends. The people we love are precious partly because they are finite, irreplaceable, here for now but not forever.
Maybe the weight of knowing everyone will die is also the weight of knowing that love exists at all in a universe that didn’t have to arrange for such impossible beauty, such temporary miracles, such brief opportunities for hearts to recognize each other across the vast loneliness of existence.
Tonight I carry both the sorrow and the privilege of loving mortal beings in a mortal world, knowing that the arithmetic of loss is also the arithmetic of having had something worth losing.