A Year Too Short.

I came across a Reddit post. The title made me stop in my tracks: “Cancer won guys, see ya!”. I knew it was going to wreck me. I still clicked. And god, did it wreck me. It was written by a 21-year-old boy, diagnosed with Stage 4 Colorectal Cancer back in 2023. After countless chemotherapy sessions and hospital visits, the doctors finally told him: “There’s nothing more we can do.” He might not make it to the end of this year.

He’s just a year younger than me. A year younger. And he might never be my age.

I knew this post would hit home, but I didn’t know how hard. I know what cancer does to people. I’ve watched it hollow out homes and leave behind silence. I’ve watched it blur timelines, turn futures into fragments. And his post wasn’t just a stranger’s farewell—it was a mirror. I was rewatching grief. I read something once about grief, that it’s a circular staircase. You might find yourself exactly where you started, more than once. It loops. It echoes. And now, here I am—grieving someone I’ve never met.

He wrote about what it’s like to live these days, knowing they might end any day. How he would miss the lights, the noise, the laughter. How strange it feels to watch the world go on while his is winding down. He said that by next Diwali, he would be just a memory. He finds himself planning for the future out of habit—then remembers, there is no such future.

“I had dreams, you know?” That’s what he wrote. Just like all of us, he had dreams too. He wanted to travel the world, build something of his own, maybe adopt a dog.

Ever since I read that post, all I’ve been thinking about is how he’s being robbed—of the life he dreamed of, lived for, worked toward. He’ll never go to college. Never stand at a chai tapri with friends, talking for hours about nothing and everything. He’ll never fall in love. Never make the kind of mistakes he would’ve laughed at years down the road. He’ll never travel to the places he dreamed of as a kid. Never build the life he imagined—the one he deserved. Everything he would have done, if only he could have.

And yet, the world will go on. People will make plans, laugh over coffee, chase their dreams, adopt pets, travel to their favorite places. But he won’t.

Nothing will change for the world. But someone’s entire world is about to change. The people left behind— they’ll experience the most jarring thing about grief: the way life continues around you, completely unaffected. It’s like standing in a busy street, and the world around you blurs with every second, but no one stops.

I’ve been on my journey of grief for a very long time now. And it’s so much harder than anyone tells you. It’s not just sadness—it’s a void, an ache. It comes and goes. It echoes. It’s a battle with reality. Grief is an endless replay of what was, what is, what could have been, and what could never be.

Through him, I found myself wondering—for the first time—about the dreams the people I lost might have had. I’ve often thought about them not being there for the most prominent days of my life—how proud, happy, and excited they would have been. But I never sat and thought about what would have been the most prominent days of their life.

They had dreams too. They would’ve wanted to travel the world, try different foods, play cricket again with their best friend. To be there for everything—birthdays, anniversaries, weddings. To show up, to belong. They would’ve wanted to live too, right?.

I think of all the laughter they would have shared, all the mornings they would have woken up with a plan, all the milestones they would have achieved, all the love they would have experienced, all the mistakes they would have made, all the matches they would have been to watch, all the dreams they would have fulfilled or tried to. And now, none of it will happen. That’s the cruelty of life, isn’t it? It snaps in a second, and your five-year plan cannot control it.

I can’t help but feel the weight of it in my own life—the fragility of the time I have, the way every choice, every moment, is borrowed. How many of my own dreams might go unfulfilled if life decided differently? As someone with a chronic illness, this is the reality I live with every day. But I still dream, I still plan, just like him, just like everyone. And that’s the beauty of being human: you live with this dreadful knowledge and still try to live anyway.

He said these days, he is just trying to live in the small moments; he is not seeking anything anymore. Just the small moments—which we often overlook, ignore, don’t pay attention to. And yet, those small moments are everything. The sunlight through a window, the sound of a friend’s laughter, the taste of chai in the evening. They are fleeting, but they are real. They are the moments we have, the only ones we can hold onto.

Grief has a way of teaching us that every day is borrowed, that every moment is a gift we often forget to unwrap. It makes you see life in sharp relief—how fragile, how fleeting, how extraordinary even in its ordinary rhythm. Every laugh, every breath, every shared glance becomes sacred, because you know it could end at any moment. And yet, we wake up, we keep moving, we keep dreaming, we keep loving, even when the shadow of loss looms over us.

I don’t know him. I will never know him. And yet, I feel tethered to his days—the fear he carries, the small victories he celebrates, the moments he notices that I might overlook in my own life. His presence lingers in my mind, reminding me that life is not just mine to inhabit. It is a network of unseen connections, of strangers’ hearts and stories and fleeting moments that leave footprints on our own. His grief, his courage, his fleeting joys—they echo in me, and in that echo, I find a strange kind of companionship.

It makes me wonder about all the lives that brush past ours, quietly shaping us without our knowledge. How many dreams go unfulfilled, how many hearts are stolen by circumstance, how many small victories pass unnoticed? And yet, even in that shadow, even in that loss, we keep living. We keep noticing. We keep holding onto the moments that matter, however tiny they may seem, because they are all we truly have.

This is for everyone I have lost to life, for everyone who reads this and experiences the bittersweet essence of being human.

and for the boy, who I don’t know, but will surely never forget.

-P