Lately, I’ve been thinking about death. Hearing about Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s sudden passing felt like a sign to pick apart my feelings around the inevitable. So I did what I usually avoid and I sat with it. I wrote and reflected.

I wish I had a healthier relationship with death. I’m not ready. Not to die, and definitely not to lose the people I love. I’ve been lucky (or maybe not?) to escape certain real-life experiences so far. Death, especially, feels like something happening just outside my life, but never quite in it.

When financial expert Tiffany Aliche’s husband Jerrell Smith died unexpectedly from an aneurysm, it made me tear up. Imagine how she felt as someone it happened to. They were madly in love, had weathered storms together, and built something that looked so real. Growing old with someone always sounds like something “older people” do, but really, we’re all growing older in real time, minute by minute, year by year. Losing someone who holds space in your everyday life? That’s the kind of ending I’m afraid of. Who wants the journey to end?