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Sometimes, healing begins not with music, but with the sounds you can’t un-hear.
It began with a call I never imagined. A friend. A colleague. A mother who had already lost both her parents and her husband was now facing the sudden death of her 21-year-old son. No warning. No signs. Just a quiet, irreversible collapse.
At the hospital, she sat on one of the rows of locked chairs, like her life, now fixed in place, unmoving. Her hands were clasped too tightly, her breath shallow, as if even air now hurt. I sat beside her, both of us held in a silence louder than words. Even in that frozen moment, she was already speaking of organ donation, offering life through her son’s death. I wanted to say, Wait. Breathe. Be sure. But the moment was moving too fast, too fiercely. He was taken to the mortuary. She ran behind the ambulance and climbed in. We followed in a car that felt too slow, too small for what was unfolding.
That night, sleep didn’t come. Our bodies stayed alert and shattered. And the next morning, we walked into the mortuary, a place where silence hums, not with peace, but with pain that presses against the skin. The day he died, I heard everything. The stretcher was too small for his long frame. The metal legs scraped against the tiles, the air screaming. The wheels groaned under the weight. The white sheet rustled when pulled over him. Each sound lodged itself into my skin. I stood there, unable to swallow, my throat tightening in the spaces where grief was too large to pass through. Then I climbed into the ambulance beside his mother. There was no space to breathe. No room to feel. It was her last ride with her son, and I was there, a witness to a kind of love that never prepared for this kind of ending. I wasn’t sure what I was grieving in that moment, his death, her devastation, or the echo of something in me that had long been buried but was now shaking loose with each jolt of the vehicle.
Some grief is ancestral. Some are unspoken. And sometimes, all it takes is the sound of love at its most raw to awaken every unhealed loss inside your bones.
Outside, the city moved on, traffic blaring, bikes weaving past, the honking insistent as ever. But inside the ambulance, it was another world. Every sound was amplified: the engine’s roar, a chainsaw carving through my chest, the passing scooter a flash of disruption, and my own heartbeat, fists against a locked door. I was holding the stretcher to steady it, even though nothing could hurt him anymore. Still, the idea of him falling again, even now, was unbearable. My arms ached, not from weight, but from memory. His mother kept wiping his face in soft, rhythmic circles, her hands trembling but tender. As if she believed that love, if offered gently enough, could pull him back.
This is grief without noise, but not without depth. Her touch was a desperate act of devotion launched into the void, returned only as an ache in our own bodies. I sat frozen, every muscle tense, as though any movement might spill the silence into tears we were barely holding back.
The pain that comes like a boomerang
The ambulance came to a halt, but inside me, everything kept spinning. There was a ringing in my ears. My jaw remained clenched, and my spine locked into place. I realized then that I wasn’t just grieving his death. I was meeting a grief I had denied for years, a grief from over a decade ago that I had never faced in full. I had not seen the body then. Calling him the body, my brother, felt like a betrayal. The word scraped against my throat, hollow and wrong, as if my body itself recoiled from the sound I hadn’t attended to the final moments.
But now, here I was, unable to look away. My breath shallow, my hands cold, my heartbeat echoing with the weight of that earlier goodbye that had never come. Maybe this moment wasn’t just about him. Maybe this was life drawing a full circle.
Maybe grief, when left unmet, returns not to punish, but to offer a second chance to listen, not with distance, but with presence.
And now, these sounds I heard were a map back to the wounds I had silenced.
Such is the postmortem of life
If you want to understand how life truly works, go once to such a room, not to be shocked, but to listen.
You’ll find answers here, not the ones you prayed for, but the ones that rearrange the way your breath moves through your chest. And sometimes, that’s how healing begins, not with peace, but with the body tensing in the presence of truth.
The postmortem room, a huge, dim hall with high ceilings and hollow walls that echoed even the softest breath. The metal benches creaked beneath us, the flickering tube light buzzed above, and the slow, rhythmic fan overhead didn’t cool the room; it stirred the heaviness in our chests. The air was thick with dread and the ache of what we already knew. The careless clatter of metal trays, the scratch of a pen on forms no one wants to fill, the hum of grief suspended in the air. The room smelled of chemicals and silence, but it wasn’t silent at all. Every sound pierced the skin like cold rain, unwelcome, familiar, almost ancestral. Grief began its work here, not gently, but with force, through the body, through sound. I wanted to whisper to her, “Let’s go home.” But what home was there now? Her home had been her boys. A part of her home was here. And the rest of us sat in that echoing chamber, not seeking answers, but witnessing the weight of truth settling into our bones. The echo of every passing footstep moved through me like sound waves breaking against the ribs.
Where time lay still
They called her in. I hesitated, unsure if I should follow. The weight of doubt filled my chest. Would my presence offer comfort or just be another weight she had to carry? But then they called me too. We walked down a long corridor that felt more like a tunnel to something final, not light. Every step echoed, louder than it should have been. My slippers suddenly felt wrong, my limbs too stiff, my breath too loud.
When we entered the room, it was as if we had crossed into another dimension, where time slowed and grief took tangible form. The air was different here, cooler, quieter. And then we saw her: the doctor. Young, almost too young for this work. Yet grounded. Steady. Her presence didn’t erase the noise, but it softened it. She didn’t look away. She didn’t rush. Her calmness didn’t demand we be strong; it simply allowed us to be.
The voice that healed
She welcomed us into this quiet room that had seen too much death. And death is quiet, isn’t it?
Her voice was quiet, too. “He had an abnormally large heart,” she said gently. “It was hard to detect. He lived as long as he did because of how well you cared for him. Nothing more could have been done.” With those words, the room shifted.
Her voice became this soft blanket of silence around our trembling shoulders. My breath returned in small, steady bursts. My body, frozen in hyper-alertness, began to soften. I glanced at his mother, still wrecked, but something in her, too, began to anchor. The doctor didn’t just speak, she stayed. She listened without trying to fix, held space for every wave of what-if: “I was holding him,” “We reached in ten minutes,” “I was talking to him the whole time…” And then, again, her voice, steady, unshaken: “Ma’am, you’ve done everything you could. And even more. I can confirm that.”
That confirmation didn’t erase the ache, but it wrapped around it with truth and tenderness. In that room where death had spoken, life whispered back.
For days afterward, my body kept the echo, the screeching chairs, the thudding ambulance doors, the rustling papers. These weren’t background noises; they etched themselves into skin like invisible tattoos. Each sound became either a weapon or a balm. But what stayed, what softened the bracing, was her voice. The doctor didn’t fill silence with answers. She simply stood there. And because of that, so did we. Healing didn’t arrive with instructions. It came in the form of one steady voice, one breath that told my body it could stay. That it was safe, even if just for a moment, to breathe. To listen again.
SAMAY- Let her speak his name
In the days that followed, his mother occupied my thoughts. I wondered if, for her, survival would come not through forgetting, but through the quiet courage to remember. To speak of him not just in the past tense, not only in whispers, but fully, by name. To recall his voice, his laughter, the way he once said “Mummy” when he was small. Because some voices aren’t meant to disappear.
They say we die twice: once when the body stops breathing, and again when our name is spoken for the last time.
I hoped that second death never comes too soon for him. Let his name remain not a memory, but a rhythm. A pulse. A part of the air still shaped by his presence.
And now, after six long years, his mother has begun to do just that. On June 22, 2025, she created something quietly powerful, a circle named SAMAY, after her son. Samay, meaning time. It’s not therapy. It doesn’t offer solutions. It offers space. A space where women speak of loss, not to be fixed, but simply to be heard. There is no agenda, only shared breath and unhurried presence.
Here grief is different, soft, like a sigh the body didn’t know it was holding. Chairs don’t screech. Voices tremble, but they speak. Silence doesn’t echo as emptiness; it resonates with presence. In SAMAY, the nervous system recalibrates. Shoulders drop. Hands unclench. Breath deepens. And in that pause, something long held finally exhales.
This, I believe, is the sound of healing. Not the erasure of pain, but the soft making of space around it. Time doesn’t heal, it stretches. Between one heartbeat and the next. Between a scream and a whisper. Between death and all that still continues.
We grow around the wound, like a tree that hums gently around its hollow. And in that widening, we find others who hum too. Samay’s life may have ended, but his name continues, in stillness, in story, in the strength with which his mother now speaks. His voice hasn’t gone silent; it has become rhythm. A rhythm of remembrance. Of holding and being held. We carry him now not as absence, but as song. A life remembered. A death honored. A love that didn’t stop, it simply changed shape. And each time we stay with what hurts, rather than turn away, something true resounds.
That, too, is healing.
That, too, is sound.
Note: Pictures in this article are representative and not related to the author.
