### He Could Still Be Here

There are sentences that get stuck in your throat, thoughts so heavy they feel like they could anchor you to the floor. For some of us, the heaviest is this one: “My dad could still be alive, but he’s not.”

It’s a different kind of grief. It’s not the gentle sadness of a long life lived to its natural conclusion. It’s not the tragic shock of a sudden, unavoidable accident. It is grief laced with the sharp, bitter tang of ‘what if.’ It’s a wound that doesn’t just ache; it burns with injustice.

This is the grief of the preventable.

It replays in a constant, tormenting loop. The missed diagnosis. The symptoms that were dismissed as something minor. The phone call you wish you’d made, or the one you wish you’d answered. The plea to see a doctor that was ignored. The moment in the hospital when you felt something was wrong but didn’t have the words or the courage to scream until someone listened.

You become a detective of the past, sifting through memories for clues you should have seen. You mentally re-edit your life, creating a parallel timeline where you did things differently. In that other, better world, he’s still here. He’s at the other end of the phone, telling a bad joke. He’s complaining about the lawn. He’s meeting the grandchild he never got to hold. That beautiful, ghostly world is so close you can almost touch it, which makes the reality of this one all the more brutal.

Anger becomes a close companion. It’s a clean, hot fire in the messy fog of sorrow. Anger at the healthcare system, at a specific doctor, at the universe’s careless cruelty. Sometimes, the anger is even directed at him, for not taking better care of himself, for not listening, for leaving you with this impossible burden of ‘what could have been.’

And underneath it all, there is the guilt. The crushing, irrational, and yet all-consuming guilt. “If only I had pushed harder. If only I had known more. If only I had been there.” It’s the survivor’s futile attempt to seize control of a narrative that spun out of control, to find a reason in the senseless.

People who haven’t experienced this kind of loss may not understand. They offer platitudes about time healing all wounds, about remembering the good times. They don’t grasp that your memories are tainted by the knowledge of how it ended. The good times are a painful reminder of the years that were stolen.

There is no neat conclusion to this story. There is no bow to tie on the grief of a preventable death. You don’t “get over it.” You learn to carry it. You learn to live with the two timelines running side-by-side in your mind—the life you have, and the life he should have had. You find a way to honor the man he was, while simultaneously raging against the reasons he is gone.

He could still be here. He’s not. And the hardest part is learning to live in the world where that sentence is true.