Suffering Around Others

Lately, I feel selfish. I feel angry. And no matter how much I try to reason with myself, I can’t stop.

My father died suddenly — without warning, without preparation, without any chance for me to make sense of it — and yet, the rest of my family outside my mother, my sister, and my dad’s older brother… they act like nothing happened. They laugh, they smile, they go about their lives as if the ground didn’t just collapse beneath us. And it makes me furious. It feels unfair. I know grief doesn’t look the same for everyone, and I tell myself I shouldn’t feel this way, but the truth is I do. I can’t stop it.

It feels selfish, like I’m demanding that others carry this pain with me, but I can’t help resenting how easily they appear to move on. My dad is gone forever, and they carry on as if his absence doesn’t echo in every room. Why him? Why did my father have to be taken away while the world goes on untouched? I ask myself this over and over, and I never find an answer.

At night, the questions don’t let me rest. I wake from nightmares of watching him die in front of me, frozen, powerless, unable to save him. It replays again and again, like some cruel reminder that I couldn’t protect him. And even worse — I know this isn’t the last time I’ll feel this way. Someday, I’ll lose my mother too. And then what will I have left? What will be the point of life once both of them are gone? That thought haunts me more than I can describe.

In my 26 years, I’ve already buried over ten family members. Grandparents, uncles, relatives who were supposed to be here longer — all gone. My life feels cursed, marked by death, misfortune, conflict, and sadness at every turn. Sometimes I wonder if I did something in a past life to deserve this, or if my family is carrying a curse none of us can escape. It feels like something is chasing me, waiting in the shadows, determined to make my existence as miserable as possible.

And the worst part is that I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay. Everyone says time heals, but how can time stitch up a wound that keeps reopening? How can I find peace when the nightmares keep pulling me back into the moment I lost him?

I feel like a selfish person for wishing others hurt the way I do. I feel like a broken person for being angry at people just for smiling, for living. But more than anything, I feel haunted — by death, by absence, by the belief that life is never going to let me rest.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe one day I’ll look back and find a moment of light, a brief reprieve where the curse loosens its grip. But right now, all I can do is sit with this anger, this sorrow, and try to survive it — even if I don’t believe I ever truly will.