Between Heaven and Here

I’ve learned that grief rarely gives answers. Instead, it gives perspective. Death teaches us how to live, how to love more fiercely, how to forgive faster, how to hold people closer.

Death is a topic I have avoided thinking about for most of my life. It has always felt too heavy, too mysterious, too final to hold for so long. Even now, as I write about it, there’s a quiet resistance inside me, a part that still wishes to look away, to keep it as a distant concept that happens to others but never quite touches me. But I’ve come to learn that death has a way of finding us, whether we want it or not.

When I was younger, death was just a word adults whispered about when they thought we weren’t listening or when they switched to Igbo because they believed we wouldn’t understand. “Someone has passed,” or “Ị ma na onye a anwụgo” they would say, their voices low and eyes distant. I didn’t really understand what it meant. All I knew was that it meant someone was gone, that they would no longer show up for Christmas, or wave from across the street. Someone’s aunt. Someone’s father. A neighbor. I would hear the words (he’s gone, she passed away) but they didn’t land anywhere in my heart. I didn’t understand what it meant for someone to be here one day and gone the next. I only knew that the next morning, the world still turned, and everyone still went on living. Life, in those early years, felt endless as if everyone and everything we love will stay forever.

As a child, death was simply a sad and distant word. I thought it meant that we just wouldn’t see someone anymore, like they had moved away to a far-off place. But growing older, I started to feel its weight. It became real, personal…

I remember the first time I felt it closely, not through losing a blood relative, but through someone who was like a father to me. He was kind, steady, good. He was good in the way that goodness doesn’t need to be announced. The kind of man whose presence felt like a shelter. When he died, something in me shifted quietly, yet deeply. I remember the initial denial, then the silence that followed the news, how the world kept moving…It’s strange, how grief can be both quiet and loud at the same time. The world around me didn’t stop. Cars still passed by. People still laughed. The sun still rose the following morning, unapologetically bright. But inside me, something had gone dim.

It was then I understood that death doesn’t just take people away, it changes those who remain. It leaves invisible fingerprints on the soul. Death changes you. Not just in the obvious ways (tears, sleepless nights, heartaches) but in quiet ways you only notice much later. It alters how you see time, how you speak, how you love. You start saying I love you more often, or maybe you say it less because the words feel too sacred now. You begin to notice the small things, the way someone’s laughter fills a room, the comfort of a familiar hand resting on your shoulder. You realize that all of it, is temporary. And yet, somehow, that realization doesn’t make life emptier; it makes it more precious.

You start noticing how fragile everything is, how quickly a voice can become a memory, how easily laughter can turn to longing. You begin to hold people closer, even when you don’t say it out loud. You realize that love, true love, always risks loss.

For a while, I was angry with God. I couldn’t understand why He would allow goodness to vanish so suddenly. Why prayers sometimes go unanswered. Why we must learn the language of grief when we never for once wanted to speak it. But over time, I started to see death differently, not as a punishment, but as a doorway. Painful, yes, but also holy in its own strange way. Because in facing death, we are forced to face life…to look at it, raw and unfiltered, and ask ourselves what truly matters.

I used to think that the opposite of life was death, but now I think it’s forgetting. Because death doesn’t take love away. It doesn’t erase presence, it only transforms it. The people we lose don’t disappear into nothing; they become woven into the spaces between our days. Sometimes in the way a song feels suddenly familiar, or in the urge to do something kind simply because they once did.

I now realize that God hides even in our grief. That He is closest to us when our hearts are breaking, gathering the pieces with a tenderness we cannot yet feel. That every tear that we shed, every ache, is known by Him. I used to think that the comfort in the verse “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.“ meant that the pain would go away. But now I know that comfort means something different, it means God’s presence fills cracks where the pain lives. It means the ache remains, but you are not alone in it.

People say that grief softens over time, but I’m not sure it ever really leaves. It just becomes quieter, less sharp. Sometimes it returns suddenly, in a song or a photograph. But when it does, it no longer feels like pure pain. It feels like remembrance; a gentle reminder that someone once existed so beautifully that their absence still echoes.

Death, is not just an ending. It is a mirror, showing us who we are and what we hold most dear. It strips life down to its simplest truths…that we are dust and breath, that everything we own can vanish in an instant, that love is the only thing we ever truly carry with us. And maybe that’s the point, to live in such a way that when death comes, it finds us already awake, already grateful.

I am still afraid of death. But I also find comfort in knowing that it cannot touch what is eternal, the soul, which returns home to God who made it, to the Love that has no end. And maybe that’s why Jesus wept at Lazarus’ tomb, not because He doubted the resurrection, but because He understood the ache of being human, the sacred sorrow of saying goodbye, even when goodbye is not forever.

We live, we love, we lose, and yet somehow, love remains. It is the one thing that even death cannot steal.