#writingtap day 053 — About death, and losing… and death.

A tribute for a life winner who once touched everyone’s life.

Velika Li
3 min readSep 13, 2021

Death seems like a confusing thing for us, humans. How can someone fathom the very idea of someone who always exists, can just go away like that? How can someone just be as though as they’re never here? It’s like everything about them is limited inside our limited memory.

Death is basically an interruption of habit of presence. We are so used to someone’s presence; then death comes, abruptly cutting ties. It’s like stopping in the middle of a sentence before finishing. It’s like… taking in a deep breath, let out, but there’s no continuation; there’s no other breath drawn. It’s just… sudden. Death works not actually like a trilogy of novel with “THE END” written at the last page — that way we know the main character still had the journey but just without us knowing — THE END is a living separation.

Death works like a novel that just stops in between sentence — it might not even be a full drawn word.

Death is an interruption of someone’s very breathing presence — and we are haunted by the leftover presence, but not to be here anymore. Is that why people are so afraid of dying? Are we just fear the feeling of losing? Is it the regret? If life is as though as a thread, you and I have different length of one. We both don’t know whose is longer. That’s not the idea that some Mighty Being cut the thread, indicating it is the end for either of us. We just already have that fixed length of thread, we walk through life, holding that thread to lead us ahead — then we just reach the other end of it.

If life is as though as a road we all walk on our own, it’s like there’s this one time you walk together and then someone said: I gotta stop here, it’s okay, you can leave me here. I’ll be good here.
It’s like we, the living ones, are the ones leaving them behind. We must leave all those behind though. We live, hence we have the ability to move on. Life forces us to move on. We still gotta live.

Is life a blessing, or actually death is?

For a life that has been a very blessing for everyone who was touched by your presence.
Thank you for leaving the world as a better place when you were with us.
In our loving memory, Dony Kurniawan. (1990–2021).
Also always fond in my heart, Karina Santoso. (1997–2014)

Photo on the left: Karina Santoso (1997–2014). Photo next to it: Dony Kurniawan (1990–2021).

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Velika Li

A nerd with varied interests. Currently reforming old habit.