Wherever I go, there I am.

Early this morning, the father of a friend passed away.

While this was not my first time to console a friend on the passing of a loved one, it is the first time that I am able to do so with a full understanding of what it means to have lost someone close to you; my grandfather -whom I lived with for all my life- passed away earlier this year.

When I received my friend’s txt informing me of her father’s passing, I thought that I would be able to give more than just "condolences." I thought that, after all that I had been through myself, surely I could reach out to her on the same level. Surely, I thought, I could say something that would at least be comforting.

And yet I was dumbfounded.

I realized that my friend’s father’s death is a deeply personal experience, one that I could never hope to understand entirely. Death, I found, is a religious experience that leaves us changed in ways that no words could ever convey.

Each death is unique.

"My deepest condolences," I finally managed to type out, with the knowledge and fatal acceptance of just how poorly comforting those words are despite the rich understanding of what they truly mean.