When Death Visits a Foe, What Do You Do With that Empathy? We Took His Office Tea

Dear Gabrielle,

My boss is grieving. Consecutive deaths, weeks apart. We don’t get along—on paper, we’re civil. We talk. We smile. But behind those polite exchanges, there is no love between us.

And yet, when death came for him, I felt something heavy shift within me. Pity. Sorrow. Empathy. Because I know firsthand how cruel death can be. How it carves you open. How it strips away the layers of image, ego, and effort. How it spits you out fragile and haunted, exposed and suspended in a silence only grief can conjure.

And for someone who believes in karma, like me, I know how loss can feel like judgment. Humiliation. Shame. You begin to wonder: Did I bring this upon myself? Was this my fault? If I had done this, or avoided that, would the outcome have changed?

I’ve lived through that silence before. That reckoning. That questioning.

Once upon a time, I too stood on a self-righteous pedestal—not because I was better, but because I was worse. I was beneath. A bottomless pit with a hollow shell of self. I wore masks. Performed strength. Lost touch with who I really was, convinced I had to be someone else to be loved, accepted, chosen.

But death… it crawled into that hollowness, dug out the cold, the ice, the rock lodged in my chest. It exhumed all the frozen emotions, the bottled-up guilt, the suspended thoughts, the stubbornness I mistook for resilience—and spat them on my face. It made me feel everything. All at once.

So I know what it’s like to fall and feel like it’s retribution. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I once craved retribution for him. I once wished he’d be humbled. That life would come for him the way it came for me. I never imagined it would be this way. I never imagined, death would pay him a visit.

So now I sit with these questions. Did I wish this into being? Was this karma, or just coincidence? Am I that vengeful? That ugly on the inside? A demon? A devil? Or is life just… life?

I don’t know.

I only know that when he didn’t show up to work, and we heard about his loss, we mourned for a moment. But soon after, we laughed. We drank his office tea. We joked, teased, and resumed our roles. The sadness evaporated. The grief was momentary, shallow.

And as we laughed, I remembered my own loss.

I remembered the knives reality threw at my back while the world moved on.

I remembered the shame of being humbled like that—suddenly, irreversibly. How I felt small, weak, disposable. I remembered the anger that I might have failed. That I may have allowed it to happen. That maybe, just maybe, I could have prevented it.

That’s the cruelty of grief. When it’s yours, it becomes everything. When it’s someone else’s, it’s background noise.

Gabrielle, I’ve come to believe this:
Just because something is natural, doesn’t mean it will be easy.
Just because death is inevitable, doesn’t mean it will ever feel fair.

Some people are born.
Some people die.
Some rise and are honored.
Some are humiliated and forgotten.

And sometimes, those who suffer receive no comfort, while those they mocked drink tea and laugh and move on with their lives.

But every death—whether it visits a loved one, a stranger, or even a foe—reminds people like me of our visit. Of our avalanche. Of our landslide. We are never untouched.

And maybe that’s what empathy truly is: the unwanted gift of remembering.

With love.