By Joshua Fields Millburn

You are dry heaving in your rental car, parked a few feet from the procession. The windshield wipers fend off a light rain.

You don’t usually get anxious before speaking in public, but your brother’s eulogy is different. There are more people here than you expected, but that’s not what’s activating your nervous system. This moment feels like a demarcation—an admission he’s not coming back.

Your hometown still looks familiar, but the details are foreign. On the drive to the funeral, you passed your first retail job; that storefront is now a kung fu studio. Your elementary school is gone. Your favorite ice cream shop, too. The abandoned homes that once dotted your block have been replaced by a large sign announcing a forthcoming community center.

Now, at the cemetery, you exit the car and weave through the tombstones. The rain intensifies on your way to the gravesite. You’re glad you brought an umbrella.

People you haven’t seen in decades pull you into long hugs. Everyone wonders how y’all lost touch. “Life got in the way,” someone says.

Two giant poster-board photos of your brother mark where you’re supposed to stand. It’s time to let go.

You begin reading from the paper in your hand. The downpour turns torrential the moment you say your brother’s name. The ink bleeds down the page. The words disappear. So you speak from memory.

You tell the crowd they don’t need to cling to the past. Everything fades, you say. Then you remind them your brother would want laughter today, not reverence. If he were here, he’d be the first to make a joke.

By the end of the ceremony, you can’t distinguish tears from rain. The gravediggers do their work. An elder relative says, “Funerals aren’t for the dead; they’re for the living.”

An hour later, on the other side of town, the sun breaks through the clouds. The air feels different. You think about all the things you once held so tightly:

The dream home you thought would fix everything was, in the end, just four walls and a roof.

The career you chased for years eventually became something you felt stuck inside.

The kids you grew up with now have kids of their own, lives that kept moving while you weren’t looking.

Nothing ends.
It changes.

And whatever you’re clinging to
is already gone.

The post Nothing Ends appeared first on The Minimalists.