Tomorrow Didn’t Come

Some moments split life into before and after. The call, the message, the sudden news that someone you know, someone you thought you’d see again, is gone.

And even though we all “know” death is part of the deal, that it hovers at the edges of every story, when it steps into the center, it feels like a violation. Like reality broke a promise you thought it had made.

The shock isn’t just about loss. It’s about the illusion it shatters, the belief that life follows an order, that the older go first, that tomorrow will always arrive. But sometimes it doesn’t. One day, it doesn’t.

I found myself thinking about time, about how often I tell myself there will be another chance to reconnect, to meet, to share one more dinner, one more laugh. I believed there would be time. And then, there wasn’t.

We live with a quiet assumption: that life has an order, that children bury parents, not the other way around. That age comes with a sequence, like chapters in a book, each one following neatly after the last.

But the truth is less tidy. Death does not respect our sense of symmetry. It doesn’t check the calendar or consult the script we think we’re following. It arrives when it arrives, sudden, uninvited, and often out of turn.

And that’s what makes it sting. The disruption isn’t only in the absence of the person, but in the fracture of that imagined order. Someone younger, someone still full of plans, someone you assumed would still be there “next time.” And when that “next time” never comes, the weight of the unfinished, the unsaid, presses in.

We like to believe in tomorrows. We schedule, we postpone, we defer conversations and meetings and moments, as if life had a patient hand waiting to deal us more time. But the deck can run out at any moment. And when it does, the illusion collapses, leaving us with nothing but the raw truth: tomorrow is not guaranteed.

Time has a way of stretching the space between people. Not out of malice, but out of life’s momentum. Work, family, distance, all the quiet reasons that explain why years can pass without seeing someone you once shared everything with.

We tell ourselves it’s fine, that the bond is still there, waiting. And often it is. A quick text, a short message, and the familiarity returns like no time has passed. But sometimes that illusion of permanence tricks us. It whispers: you’ll see each other soon, there’s no rush.

I thought that too, a message here, another there. The last one even had the intention of meeting up, of finally closing that gap. But I didn’t insist. I didn’t push. I trusted that there would be another chance.

That’s the cruelty of distance: not only the space it creates, but the regret it leaves behind. The ache of realizing that the “someday” you postponed has already expired.

Death is a brutal teacher. It doesn’t arrive with patience or gentle reminders. It crashes in, unannounced, and leaves you with lessons you never asked for.

You learn that postponement is dangerous. The things we delay, the calls, the visits, the words we hold back are not stored in some vault of future time. They vanish with the person who’s gone.

Another lesson is fragility. We like to think of life as sturdy, predictable, built on rails that carry us forward. But it’s more like glass: beautiful, useful, and breakable at any moment.

And it teaches us about control, or rather, the lack of it. We build plans, schedules, and dreams. But death does not respect them. It reminds us that despite our efforts to organize our lives, some things will always be outside our reach.

These are not lessons we learn in theory. They are lessons we feel in the body, in the sudden heaviness in the chest, in the silence where a voice used to be, in the shock that keeps repeating, “But I thought there would be one more time, one more laugh, one more text, one more dance."

Grief wears two faces. The first is the obvious one: pain. The absence that echoes louder than words, the weight in the chest that refuses to lift, the sudden sting of remembering something you can no longer share. It is the face of loss, stark and uncompromising.

But there is another face, quieter but just as real: gratitude. Grief only exists where love once lived. The ache is proof that something mattered, that someone left a mark deep enough to hurt in their absence.

I find myself caught between these two faces. One moment, overwhelmed by the finality of it, the dinners that won’t happen, the conversations cut short, the tomorrows erased. And the next, flooded by the warmth of memory, laughter, companionship, the unmistakable sense of having once been alive together in the same moment.

This is grief’s strange gift: it hurts because something beautiful was there. And in that way, grief is not only about endings. It serves as a testament, a constant reminder that our shared experiences matter, even in the absence of the other person, perhaps even more so because of it.

Loss has a way of turning us back toward the living. It sharpens the edges of time, making us see how fragile and finite it is. And in that sharpness, it offers a choice: to keep postponing, or to stop waiting.

It calls us to reach out now, not later. To send the message, to make the call, to insist on the meeting. To risk the awkwardness of saying what we really feel, rather than assuming there will be another chance.

It also calls us to live differently. Not recklessly, but attentively, with the awareness that every "ordinary" moment is extraordinary because it won’t repeat. That the simplest dinner, the smallest joke, the quietest evening can become the memory we’ll one day cling to.

Death strips away illusions, but in doing so, it clears the view. It reminds us that presence matters more than postponement, that love matters more than pride, that “someday” is never a given.

In the end, death leaves us with a truth we’d rather ignore: time is not a promise. It is a gift, unpredictable, fleeting, and precious in ways we usually notice only after it’s gone.

We tell ourselves there will be more tomorrows, more chances, more space to fit in the things and the people we care about. But one day, tomorrow won’t come. Not for them. Not for us.

That thought could feel heavy, but it doesn’t have to. It can also be clarifying. It can push us to live more urgently, to love more openly, to stop postponing what matters most.

Because if death teaches anything, it’s this: someday is fragile. And the time to reach out, to speak, to live is now.

Rodo querido;

Your passing taught me this. These words are born from the gratitude of having had you as a friend, and from the sorrow of knowing there will be no more tomorrows with you. Rest in peace, dear friend.