With your death you took her from me.
You took what you were never able to love
and destroyed its capacity to love
because of a war within
that never stopped raging from all ends.
You took her eyes from me.
You took her from me.
Your death stole from us.
In life you stole,
why must your death also bring desolation and conflict.
Please.
Do not allow your tomb to become our place of burial.
You left without leaving.
You collapsed inward and called it silence.
You made absence an inheritance
and named it fate so no one could indict you.
You were never just one wound.
You were a siege.
A long occupation of rooms that once held laughter,
a constant rationing of tenderness
until even wanting became dangerous.
She learned to look away because looking cost too much.
She learned to love quietly,
then not at all,
then only in theory,
the way people learn about fire
after the house is already ash.
Your war did not end with breath.
It learned new tactics.
It dressed itself as memory,
as loyalty,
as the lie that survival requires silence.
You called destruction complexity.
You called control protection.
You called hunger discipline.
And when the walls cracked
you blamed the storm,
never the hand that refused to stop striking.
Now grief tries to conscript us.
It wants uniforms,
wants us to march behind your name,
wants us to confuse endurance with honour.
But I refuse.
I refuse to kneel inside your ending.
I refuse to let her learn that love
only survives by shrinking.
Your grave is soil, not a centre.
It does not get to organise our lives.
It does not get to decide
how much light we are allowed.
We will not live inside your aftermath.
We will not mistake devastation for destiny.
We will not build a home
around the echo of what you never healed.
Your death ends with you.
Not with her.
Not with me.
We carry what you could not carry,
and we set it down.
We bury the war,
not ourselves.
