That night, after the hospice doctor arrived and quietly certified Angie’s death, she stayed behind. She always did.
She removed the morphine pump, then began to clean Angie’s body with the same practiced, gentle hands that had once adjusted her pillow, massaged her swollen feet, brushed her hair during those long, quiet evenings.
Around her, the family moved like shadows speaking in hushed tones, making calls, preparing for the funeral. Life, in its strange momentum, continued… even as death had just slipped through the room.
She lingered a little longer, remembering the time they had spent together. The stories. The silences. The small jokes. The moments Angie spoke of fear and dreams in the same breath.
A few days before she passed she made a request I can never say no. “Will you sing for me?” Angie had asked one evening, her voice barely above a whisper. She blinked, startled.
“Sing? What do you want me to sing?”
Angie smiled weakly. “My Way. The Frank Sinatra one. I used to belt it out at karaoke. I want to hear it… one last time.” She hesitated. She wasn’t a singer. Not by any stretch. But Angie looked at her with those wide, dying eyes. And so, she sang.
Her voice cracked halfway through. She had to pause and wipe her eyes. But Angie didn’t mind. She smiled the whole time.
“That’s how I want to go,” Angie had whispered afterward. “Knowing I did it… my way.” She carried that moment with her — a quiet echo in her bones. That memory clung to her even as she cleaned Angie’s body for the last time.
Even as the family carried on with their phone calls and arrangements. What haunted her most were the young ones. those who seemed to have the whole world waiting for them. Angie was smart. Successful. Kind.
Her life felt unfinished. Like a sentence cut off mid-sentence. Those whose lives still felt like beginnings. Those who had time stolen word by unfinished word. Cancer didn’t just take Angie. It unwrote her. Day by day. Like watching someone live on death row except here, the executioner had a name, a timeline, and no mercy. She often wondered what it must be like to know, with clarity, that death is coming.
To really know. And she wondered, too, about those of us who don’t. We know we’ll die… but not when. We live in a kind of denial we call planning. We wear time like it's endless. And then, one day… it isn't.
She didn’t go home after that. Instead, she told the driver to take her to the stadium nearby. “I needed space,” she whispered, eyes far away. She ran. Round and round the track.
The night air heavy with silence. Her chest burning, tears falling without shame. Each step like a question.
Each breath like trying to pull something lost back into her body.
“This always happens to me after a patient dies,” she said. “There’s this deep, hollow feeling in my chest. Like they took something with them. Like I gave them a piece of myself… and it never really comes back.” She paused.
The guru didn’t interrupt. He let the silence hold her like she once held Angie’s hand. Then finally, he spoke.
“That’s because you did give them something, and when done with love… that kind of giving is never lost. It just becomes… light.”
She wiped her eyes, not out of shame, but to anchor herself back in the present. The story still hovered in the air between them like the scent of rain after a long storm.
“I don’t know what I was doing,” she finally said. “I just… saw this girl in distress. She needed help, and these thoughts that image of the candle it just came to me. I said the first thing that felt right.” She looked at him.
“Was that… visualization?”
The guru nodded slowly.
