11.08.2026
Somebody dies on you
Yukari was diagnosed with cancer at twenty-eight years old. We went to Australia looking for a school for the children and another chance for her. She died there. Twenty-nine.
I was left with two kids of five and three in a country that wasn’t mine.
Of what people said to me in those weeks I don’t remember a single sentence. They were all true and none of them was any use. “She’s in a better place.” “Time heals.” “She was a very good person.”
What I do remember is sitting down with a book to look up what it said about this exactly. Not comfort: information. What happens when somebody dies.
And the text doesn’t comfort. That’s the first thing to understand about it. It doesn’t tell you it shouldn’t hurt. It tells you something else, harder and more useful:
For the soul there is never birth nor death. Nor, having once been, does he ever cease to be. He is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, undying and primeval. He is not slain when the body is slain.
Bhagavad-gītā 2.20. 1972 edition.
Notice what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say you’ll see her again. It doesn’t say there’s a better place. It promises nothing.
What held me up wasn’t the hope of seeing her again. It was understanding that what I was crying over and what she was were not the same thing.
It took me years to take it in completely. But from the first day it gave me somewhere to put my feet.