You will be Missed

David Fernandez 8/25/64 to 2/22/26

Everything ends. And this is not the cruelty of the world—it is its intelligence.

We are the only creatures who seem surprised by it. We hold a wilted flower in our hands as if it has betrayed us. We sit beside hospital beds stunned that breath does not go on forever. We stare at the last page of a chapter in our lives and whisper, It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

But who told us that?

The maple tree does not accuse October of theft. The river does not resent the bend that takes it out of sight. They understand something we are only just remembering: life is not a possession. It is a movement.

We have been schooled in clinging. To our names. To our roles. To the familiar shape of a face across the breakfast table. We cling to youth as if it were a moral achievement. We cling to plans as if the universe signed a contract with us. And when the inevitable shifting begins, we mistake it for failure.

Yet the sages have always whispered another truth: what you truly are cannot end.

The body changes, the circumstances dissolve, the relationships transform—but beneath the noise of it all is a steady current of being. Call it soul, call it awareness, call it the quiet witness behind your eyes. It is the one thing that does not wilt when the flower wilts. It is the one thing that does not fracture when the dream collapses.

Endings do not come to destroy you. They come to loosen your grip on what you were never meant to own.

Stand in any garden long enough and you will see the pattern. The seed splits open underground—a violent act, if you think about it. Its former self is ruined beyond recognition. And yet from that undoing rises a green shoot, tender and certain. If the seed had the mind of a human, it might scream, I’m dying. In truth, it is becoming.

Death—of a person, a plan, a version of yourself—is not the opposite of life. It is one of life’s most disciplined teachers. It reminds us that form is temporary, but essence is not. That the river you see is not separate from the rain that fed it, nor from the ocean that waits to receive it.

Life does not travel in a straight line from cradle to grave. It spirals. It folds back on itself. It sheds and renews, like the bark of a sycamore peeling to reveal the pale, living trunk beneath. What looks like loss from one vantage point is transformation from another.

And yes, endings can feel brutal. There is no poetry that cancels the ache of an empty chair or the silence where laughter once lived. Grief is not weakness; it is the body’s way of honoring love. To mourn is to admit that something mattered.

But grief, too, moves.

If nothing ended, nothing new could begin. Imagine a world where every leaf clung stubbornly to its branch, where every season refused to turn. The weight of it would crush the tree. Decay would overtake growth. Stagnation would masquerade as safety.

Instead, the tree releases. And in releasing, it survives.

So when life takes something from you—softly or with a force that knocks the wind from your lungs—pause before you tighten your fist. Breathe. Feel the ache without building a fortress around it. Let your tears fall into the soil of your own becoming.

There is a strange mercy in empty hands. They are available.

The caterpillar does not know about wings. It only knows the hunger that drives it to eat and the darkness of the cocoon that swallows it whole. If you could ask it mid-transformation how things are going, it might tell you everything has ended. It would not yet see the geometry of flight forming in the silence.

You may be in such a cocoon now—unsure, unrecognizable even to yourself. The life you knew dissolved. The role you wore no longer fits. The person you loved has stepped beyond your sight. And in the dark, it feels like annihilation.

But something quiet is assembling itself within you.

Endings are not punishments. They are invitations. They clear the crowded room of who you have been so that who you are becoming can enter. They burn away illusion and leave behind what cannot be burned.

Nothing truly ends. It changes form.

The child becomes the elder. The lover becomes the memory. The seed becomes the tree, the tree becomes the soil, and the soil births the seed again. The essence moves on, wearing new shapes the way the sky wears clouds.

We are not here to stop this turning. We are here to participate in it with open eyes.

So do not fear the end. Fear only the refusal to see its hidden generosity. Fear missing the beauty unfolding beneath the surface of what appears to be loss.

Because in every ending, life is not extinguished. It is rearranging itself—quietly, faithfully—into another beginning.

And if you listen closely in the stillness after something falls away, you can almost hear it: the soft, steady breath of life, reborn.