One moment you are here, tying your shoelaces for yet another sunrise run through the hills, and the next — you are gone.We lost Aruna in the space of a month. One month. No warning, no gentle slide into frailty, no graceful exit that we could have seen coming. She was fine — more than fine — and then she was gone.My aunt Aruna was the kind of woman you couldn’t keep up with even if you tried. In her late seventies, she could lace up her sneakers and pound out twelve, fourteen, even eighteen miles on a crisp San Francisco morning while you were still fumbling for your first coffee. She devoured life the way she devoured ice cream — with unselfconscious joy — and the way she devoured a humble mooli paratha, without airs, without apology. Banker by day, Wordsworth and Ghalib whisperer by night, mother, grandmother, marathoner, Urdu poetry aficionado.And yet, this vibrant woman, this endless woman, this woman who seemed to have quietly conquered time — taken, just like that.It was bacterial meningitis. Hawaii. She had gone to see her daughter and grandchildren. A routine visit. She didn’t come back.What are we to do with such suddenness? What are we to do when we find ourselves standing in the wreckage of an ordinary day, trying to make sense of the hole someone’s absence tears into the fabric of our lives?We can rage. We can mope. We can cry into our pillows and shake our fists at a God we no longer recognise. And maybe we should, for a while. But then, what?Story continues below this adWe are given no choice. We have to make our peace. Because life — cruel, beautiful, indifferent — does not wait for us to catch our breath.And so I sit with her absence. I feel it as though she has become a kind of air — everywhere, invisible, necessary. I hear her laughter as I answer calls pacing around my home, trying to get my daily steps in. I feel her with me as I cook and test a recipe destined for a restaurant table somewhere. I sense her presence as I imagine the next novel I will write, the next book I will dare to put into the world. I feel her most acutely as I am grappling with the stubborn traffic of Delhi or Mumbai, trying to get from point A to point B while mourning her quiet passage, feeling the tyres on tarmac connect me to her somehow, absurd as it sounds.I am beginning to understand that our dead do not leave us. Not entirely.They migrate into memory. They take up residence in our dreams, in our thoughts, in our muscle memory, in the strange little phrases and rituals we find ourselves repeating without thinking.They sit quietly in our DNA.Story continues below this adThey ride with us into the future — the future they can no longer see.And if you listen, really listen, you might hear them cheering you on. Urging you to keep going. Urging you to run that extra mile. To eat the ice cream and the paratha. To love what you have left, harder.Maybe this is how we make peace: by understanding that life is not a straight line but a circle, and that none of us are really gone. We change form. We move planes. As the Vedantic texts have always told us: the soul is eternal, the body merely its garment.Aruna has simply slipped into another garment.When you lose someone you love — truly love — you begin to see life not as a series of separate chapters but as one long continuum. You see that our story together doesn’t end because her story here has. I am her, and she is me, and we — all of us — are each other.We are left with gratitude.Story continues below this adWe are left with the blessing of having shared time, breath, laughter, tears, this earth, this era, together.We are left with memories that glint like gold when the day feels grey.And we are left with a choice.We can wallow. Or we can walk forward — with a deeper reverence for how fragile, fleeting, unpredictable this strange thing called life really is.And it is fragile. It is fleeting.Aunt Aruna taught me that — not just in her life but also in her death.Story continues below this adWe live, we work, we run, we plan, as though we have been handed some contract guaranteeing us a full eighty, ninety, even a hundred years. As though we have earned the right to tomorrow.But the truth is: tomorrow is not promised.As Kabir sang centuries ago:Jo kaal kare so aaj kar, jo aaj kare so ab.Pal mein pralaya hoyegi, bahuri karega kab?What you plan to do tomorrow, do today.What you plan to do today, do now.In a blink, the world may dissolve —When will you do it, then?That is the only real certainty we have — this moment. This breath. This person next to you. This heartbeat still pulsing in your chest.So do not squander it.Story continues below this adEat dessert first. Call your mother. Take the trip. Write the poem. Forgive that old grudge. Say you’re sorry. Say you’re proud. Say you love them.We owe it to the dead to keep living as they would have wanted us to. Not timidly. Not half-heartedly. But all in.I sit here, writing this, picturing her.Somewhere on a new shore. Maybe running down some divine trail lined with jasmine and jacaranda. Maybe reciting Faiz to herself. Maybe smiling that quiet smile of hers, knowing we will all catch up soon enough.I wish her peace.I wish her freedom — from this cycle of life and death.Story continues below this adAnd I thank her — for showing me how rich a life can be when you refuse to let fear or age or convention slow you down.The rest of us can only try to keep pace.And so, we pause, but we carry on.That is what we do with the pieces. We pick them up and we keep walking.We walk for them. We walk toward them. We walk with them, even now.Story continues below this adBecause they are still here — in the spaces between our thoughts, in the quiet of our prayers, in the little choices we make to live better, braver, more fully.And when our time comes, may we go as she did — with a life well-lived behind us, and with loved ones left to remember us not just with tears, but also with gratitude.Life is precious.Life is fleeting.Life is anything but predictable.Squeeze it. Savour it. Say what you need to say now — because only a fool leaves the rest to fate.Pause. But carry on.Run on, Aruna. Run on.We’ll see you at the finish line.