It was not exactly the sort of topic one normally expects at a Toastmasters meeting. We usually talk about leadership, communication, overcoming fears, finding our voices and, occasionally, why some people still think PowerPoint presentations need seventeen slides. Death is slightly more difficult to fit into a three-minute speech.
But he spoke about how frightening death can be, largely because none of us really knows what happens afterwards.
For those who are religious, there are explanations. There is heaven. There is hell. There is judgement. There is the possibility of an afterlife. In other traditions, there is reincarnation, although the more important question then becomes: reincarnated into what? Another human being? Another creature? Something else entirely? And yet, beneath all these beliefs, there remains something we cannot escape.
We don't actually know.
Perhaps that is what makes death frightening. It is not merely that we stop existing in the way we currently understand existence. It is that we cannot look beyond the door and tell the people still standing on this side what is waiting for us.
There is no return trip. No review. No five-star rating on Google Maps. Just the unknown.
But as I listened to the speech, I began wondering whether there is something even more frightening than death.
What if we reach the end of our lives and realise we had not really lived them?
There is a familiar idea, often attributed to Oprah Winfrey, about living as though you might die tomorrow while also living in the present as though you will live forever. I suppose the contradiction is the point. We need enough awareness of mortality to remind us that our time is limited, while having enough faith in tomorrow to continue planting things we may never personally see grow.
Perhaps that is what mortality is supposed to teach us. Not to be afraid of dying. But to be awake while we are alive. I thought about my mother.
Last year, she had a near-death experience, and I remember something that surprised me about myself. Somewhere deep inside, I found myself calmly hoping—or perhaps telling her, in the strange hope that she could somehow hear me—that it was okay for her to go. That I would be okay. That I would learn to make peace with it. That she could let go.
The strange thing was that… I wasn't ready.
I didn't want to lose her. Of course I didn't. But there was another part of me that understood that love sometimes means allowing another person to leave when staying would only be for our sake. I remember thinking that I would rather carry the pain of losing her than ask her to carry the burden of staying for me.
Perhaps that is one of the most difficult things about loving someone.
We spend so much of our lives trying to hold on to the people we love. We take photographs. We keep their messages. We remember their favourite food. We know the stories they told us so many times that we could probably tell them ourselves.
And then one day, they are gone.
What remains is an emptiness that is difficult to explain to someone who has never experienced it. This is perhaps why we have funerals. We often say that funerals are for the living, not the dead. The person who has died no longer needs the ceremony. It is those of us left behind who gather together, say goodbye, remember, cry, eat, pray, sit in uncomfortable plastic chairs and try to understand how the world can possibly continue when someone who was part of it is no longer here.
There is something almost ritualistic about telling ourselves that things are going to be okay. That we will get through this. That we will move on. But do we actually move on?
I recently came across a video by Benjamin Kheng in which he spoke about grief in a way that stayed with me. The idea, as I understood it, was that perhaps we don't really "get over" the death of someone we love. We don't necessarily heal in the way we talk about healing—as though grief is a wound that eventually closes and leaves us exactly as we were before.
Maybe we simply learn to live with the fact that they are gone. And perhaps that is a more honest way of looking at grief. Because if someone mattered deeply enough to leave a permanent mark on our lives, why should we expect their absence to eventually become insignificant?
We don't get over a person. We learn the shape of their absence.
At first, that absence is enormous. It occupies the room. It sits beside us at the dinner table. It appears in the moments when we instinctively reach for our phone because we want to tell them something.
Then, slowly, life begins happening around it. We laugh again. We complain about traffic. We go to work. We celebrate birthdays. We discover a new restaurant and wish they could have been there. And then, sometimes, years later, something completely ordinary brings them back for a moment. A smell. A song. A phrase. The way someone laughs. And suddenly they are there again. Not physically. But somehow, still part of us. Maybe this is why I am less interested now in the question of what happens after we die.
I still don't know. Nobody really does. Perhaps there is a heaven. Perhaps there is reincarnation. Perhaps there is something beyond what our limited human understanding can comprehend. Perhaps there is simply nothing.
I don't know.
But perhaps the more immediate question is what happens before we die. Did we tell the people we love that we loved them? Did we spend enough time with them? Did we make things because we wanted to make them, or because we wanted other people to approve of us? Did we laugh enough? Did we forgive? Did we apologise? Did we allow ourselves to be curious? Did we take the strange little opportunities that appeared in front of us? Did we live?
Because eventually, whether we are religious or otherwise, certain or uncertain about what comes next, all of us arrive at the same mystery. And perhaps the best response to a mystery we cannot solve is not to spend our entire lives being frightened of it. Perhaps it is to pay closer attention to the life we have been given. To be here. To love people while they are here. To allow ourselves to be loved.And when the time eventually comes for someone we love to leave, perhaps we will discover that saying goodbye does not mean leaving them behind.
We carry them.
Not in the way we once carried them when they were physically beside us, but in the stories we tell, the habits we inherit, the lessons we remember, the jokes we repeat and the little pieces of them that somehow become part of who we are. Maybe that is what it means to move forward. Not forgetting. Not getting over it. Not healing completely.
Just learning how to walk with an empty space beside us, while continuing to live. And perhaps, in the end, that is the most we can ask of life. That when our own turn comes, we can look back and know that although we did not understand where we were going, we were present for the journey.
Written by: Adi Jamaludin
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