There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask, and I’m sure it’s going to come across exactly as well as you think it will. ▌

What exactly is the correct emotional response to death?

Because I seem to have misplaced the instruction manual.

Somewhere along the way—after enough funerals, enough hospital rooms, enough late-night phone calls that start with “I’m sorry to tell you…”—something changed.

Or maybe something broke.

Hard to say.

---

When I was younger, death was an event.

It had structure. Expectation. A script.

You showed up.
You sat in uncomfortable chairs.
You listened to stories.
You cried—appropriately, of course. Not too much. Not too little.
You said the right things.

And most importantly, you felt the right things.

Or at least you pretended to well enough that nobody questioned it.

---

Now?

Now it feels like a notification.

A pause.

A moment where I look up, process the information, and then… continue doing whatever I was doing before.

Like I just got a weather update.

“Chance of death today: 100%.”

---

And before anyone gets too worked up—no, this isn’t indifference.

At least, I don’t think it is.

This is what happens when grief stops being a singular event and turns into a recurring subscription service you never signed up for.

Loss stacks.

Layer after layer.

At some point, your brain just… adapts.

Not because it doesn’t care.

Because it can’t keep reacting like it used to.

If it did, you’d never get out of bed again.

---

There’s also this unspoken rule that shows up every time someone dies:

You must speak kindly of the dead.

Which is great in theory.

Until your lived experience doesn’t quite line up with the highlight reel everyone else is playing.

Then what?

Do you lie?

Do you stay quiet?

Do you dig deep and find something neutral like,
“He was… consistent.”

---

The truth is, people aren’t eulogies.

They’re not curated collections of their best moments.

They’re messy. Contradictory. Complicated.

And sometimes, the version of them that others are grieving is not the version you knew.

That doesn’t make their grief wrong.

But it doesn’t make your experience disappear either.

---

So here I am.

Offering condolences.

Meant sincerely, by the way.

And then going right back to whatever I was doing five minutes ago.

And wondering if that makes me broken.

Or just… experienced.

---

Because here’s the uncomfortable possibility nobody really likes to talk about:

Maybe emotional numbness isn’t a failure.

Maybe it’s a survival skill.

---

I’ve buried enough people now to know that grief doesn’t always look like tears.

Sometimes it looks like silence.

Sometimes it looks like distance.

Sometimes it looks like continuing on because stopping isn’t an option.

---

And sometimes—

It looks like sitting in the wasteland, hearing bad news over a crackling radio…

…pausing just long enough to take it in…