Sometimes I think life is not a journey but a rehearsal for departure. We live as if permanence were an option, as if the body were not a lease. Each morning, I wake into a contract I did not sign but must honor: to work, to love, to age, to die. The clauses are unwritten, the penalties severe. The more I read the fine print of existence, the more I realize that living well is not about outwitting death but about learning to speak its language without bitterness.
I have seen how illness can arrive like an uninvited guest—polite at first, then territorial. Cancer, stroke, the long slow unraveling of memory: each teaches the same curriculum differently. The body, once an ally, becomes a bureaucracy of pain. You fill out forms for relief, sign documents of surrender, learn that medicine is not always cure but sometimes choreography—an art of pacing the inevitable. Death is no longer a stranger at the door; it is the shadow in your pulse, the tremor in your handwriting.
What unsettles me most is not the fact of dying, but the banality of its approach. One morning, you forget your keys. Another, you lose your appetite. Then the news from the doctor, the kind that changes how you measure time. You start counting sunsets, not salaries. You stop saying “next year” with confidence. Yet, strangely, the world continues with indifference—the traffic light still turns green, invoices still arrive, the child next door still learns to ride a bicycle. Death personalizes nothing. It is the most democratic event in existence.
Work, too, becomes a parable here. We chase purpose through deadlines, through the algebra of income and recognition, as though excellence were salvation. But labor, I have learned, is only holy when it is honest. The spreadsheet, the scaffold, the report—none of these outlasts us, but the integrity we pour into them leaves a faint signature on time. Sometimes, after a day that grinds me thin, I think: maybe devotion is the only form of permanence available to mortals. To work well even when no one thanks you is a kind of prayer.
The older I get, the more I see how fatigue itself is a theology. To be tired is to confess that you are not infinite. The body’s exhaustion is not a failure; it is testimony that you have participated in the world. The ache in the back, the fog in the mind—these are hymns of involvement. We are here only briefly, but we are here entirely.
And yet, beneath all that striving lies the quiet arithmetic of loss. Friends disappear into the blur of years. Parents shrink into memory. A once-loud laughter becomes a ghost note in the hallway. Even joy, if examined too closely, contains the seed of its ending. The cruel fate of consciousness is that it understands its own expiry; we are aware of the closing curtain even while the play continues.
Still, there is something redemptive about this awareness. Knowing that time is finite makes tenderness urgent. It teaches you to linger when someone laughs, to memorise the faces you love in ordinary light. It makes forgiveness practical, not poetic. You begin to see that eternity is not a destination but a manner of seeing—the way a moment can expand when inhabited fully.
I often think about the last day—whenever it comes—how I might greet it. Will I rage, as Dylan Thomas pleaded, or will I fold my hands in tired gratitude? Perhaps both. I hope that when the breath thins and the ceiling begins to blur, I can whisper a single truth: I tried. I did not always understand, but I remained curious. I kept faith with the hours given me. I worked until work became worship. I loved until love became a habit. I forgave slowly, but I did forgive. And though my body returned to dust, my intentions—those small, unrecorded mercies—might linger somewhere, like pollen carried by a patient wind.
Death, in totalism, is not the opposite of life but its punctuation. It gives meaning to the sentence. Without it, the story would sprawl endlessly and lose its syntax. So I no longer ask to escape dying. I ask only for lucidity when it comes—the chance to look it in the eye and say, with whatever strength remains: thank you for the loan. I lived the interest fully.
Kofi Amankwaa-Benneh Jr.