It took my friend going to the other side for me to fully come into my body. And to start honouring life the way it deserves to be honoured. To accept the uncertainties of life. To realise how long I had been holding my breath, waiting for something to happen before I allowed myself to fully live.

My father died in a tragic accident. I was around 7.

There was no warning. No preparation. No time to understand what was happening. One day he was here, and then he wasn’t. I don’t think a seven-year-old knows how to process something like that. So I didn’t. I simply learned to carry on.

Recently, years later, I lost a dear friend to cancer. This time, we knew. We lived with that knowing. And yet, when it happened, it still felt sudden. I am still in shock.

Because knowing that someone is going to die doesn’t actually prepare the body for their absence. The mind may know. The heart may know. But the body still looks for them. Still expects them to be here. Still reaches for the possibility of one more conversation, one more laugh, one more ordinary moment.

Something about losing my friend has begun to melt a numbness I have carried since I was seven.

For so long, I couldn’t understand people who had lost their loved ones. I could understand it intellectually, but somewhere inside me there was a distance. I now realise that distance was numbness. A numbness that had protected me for decades. And now it was finally ready to leave.

I was finally ready to accept that my father is really gone.

I had moved through the rituals. I had grieved. But when I look at it now, I realise I was grieving for my mother. For my sister. For myself. For the family we became after he was gone. I was grieving the loss his death created in our lives.

I don’t think I had ever truly grieved my father. I had never really stopped to connect with him as a person — as the man who brought me into this earth. There was an honour and a respect due to him that I had never really given.

That little girl didn’t know how to hold death, or how to say goodbye. She only knew that something terrible had happened. And so she became numb.

This is why my friend’s death has shaken something so deep inside me. In grieving him, I have begun to feel my father. I have begun to understand what it means to lose someone — an absence that enters the body, a space where a person used to be, the ache of knowing there will be no more ordinary moments, no more possibility of one more day.

Through this grief, I am finally able to honour my father. Simply by acknowledging that he lived. And through him, I came into this world. There is something sacred in that.

This is what it means to close a chapter — to finally look at it whole. To give what was never given. The grief. The gratitude. The honour. The respect. And then to turn towards my own life.

Because I had been holding my breath. Waiting for life to happen to me. Doing everything that was required, everything I thought I was supposed to do. But I wasn’t really enjoying life’s little moments. I wasn’t really here.

I look back now and realise I would make do with whatever came my way. Compromising on food. Not choosing what I really wanted. Not spending money, in the garb of being mindful. I stopped being intentional over time, and got so focused on creating my legacy that I forgot I was at the core of that legacy. I needed to pamper myself in every way, to allow all the good things to come to me.

And I wasn’t really taking care of this beautiful body — this vehicle that has carried me so faithfully all these years. The flexibility it has given me. The strength. The resilience it continues to hold.

And yet, I had stopped tending to it. There is still so much possibility in this body. But even when I made the effort, it came in spurts. A few days of movement. A few weeks of caring. Then life would take over again.

Maybe I was waiting for the right time, or to feel certain, or for life to tell me it was safe to begin. But life doesn’t offer that certainty. That is one of the deepest things death teaches us. There is no point at which everything becomes certain enough for us to finally begin living.

We behave as though we have time. We postpone the phone call, the journey, the conversation, the thing we have been wanting to learn. We tell ourselves we will start taking care of our bodies tomorrow. We will rest when things settle down. We will live when we feel more certain.

But that certainty was never coming. I was waiting for life to tell me:

You are safe. Now you can begin.

There is no such moment.

Maybe being ready has nothing to do with certainty. It has everything to do with willingness. The willingness to live without knowing how long we will have. To care for this body without knowing how long it will carry us. To say what needs to be said. To take the trip. To dance badly. To sit in the sun. To call a friend. To let ourselves be seen. To begin before we feel ready.

Because the ordinary moments are not waiting rooms for real life to begin. They are the life.

We miss them because we are always looking ahead or behind. And while we are busy making sure everything will be okay, life is happening in front of us. In a cup of tea. A familiar voice. A hand on our shoulder. The morning light entering the room. The people we love, still being here.

These things can feel so ordinary that we don’t recognise their sacredness. Until something changes. Until someone doesn’t come home. Until a voice we were used to hearing becomes a memory. Until we understand, suddenly and painfully, that this moment was not ordinary at all.

It was life.

I don’t think the answer is to live in fear of losing everything — that would only create another kind of holding. The invitation is simpler. To live with our eyes open. To let uncertainty exist beside us without letting it become the reason we don’t participate.

To stop waiting for permission. For the perfect time. The perfect version of ourselves. There may never be one.

There is only this body. This breath. This morning. These people. This particular life.

Perhaps this is what my grief is teaching me. My father left without warning. My friend left even though we knew. Two completely different departures. And yet both have brought me to the same truth:

We never really know how much time we have.

So I don’t want to keep waiting for life to happen to me. I want to participate in it. Fully. I want to come into this body, into this breath, into this moment. I want to feel what I have spent so many years trying not to feel — even when it hurts. Because feeling is also living.

And the opposite of grief isn’t happiness. Maybe it is numbness. I don’t want to be numb anymore.

I want to feel. I want to love. I want to laugh. I want to move. I want to care for this body that has remained faithful to me all these years. I want to honour the life I have been given by actually living it.

I’m not sure how much time I have. None of us does. And I don’t want that uncertainty to frighten me into holding my breath.

I want it to remind me to breathe. To be here. To be alive.

While I am here.

What are you waiting for?