Lately the news has felt like a slow drumbeat of mortality.

You see familiar faces.  People you grew up watching, people who seemed woven into the background of your life and suddenly their names are trending next to words like illness, cancer, ALS, loss. You see names like Eric Dane, James Van Der Beek, and Snooki, and even when the details are still unfolding, the emotional impact lands the same way.

Too young.
Too fragile.
Too close to home.

Some people joke that they want to skip ahead a year or two, fast-forward past whatever chapter this is. I understand the impulse. I really do.

But we don’t get to skip the hard pages of the story. We have to live them.

Working in healthcare, I know what prevention can do.
I know what screening can do.
I also know what insurance denials can do.

I’ve fought those battles myself, for my own child, sitting in that exhausting space where medicine, bureaucracy, and fear collide.

We talk about cancer and dementia and chronic illness like they’re abstractions.  Like they’re things that happen to other families, in other zip codes, in other timelines.

Until suddenly they don’t.

A dear friend of mine died at 32, shortly after giving birth, from a rare cancer. I cried then. I still cry.
There is no philosophical framework that makes that make sense. There is no neat psychological bow to tie on that.

There is only grief.
And the quiet terror that comes with realizing how little control we really have.

When the losses start piling up from famous people, friends, patients, parents, people you went to school with, it creates a strange emotional vertigo. You start counting ages. You start doing the math on your own life. You start noticing how often the phrase  “too young” appears in obituaries.

And yet, the answer is not to shut down. It’s not to pretend the system works perfectly when we know it doesn’t. It’s not to look away from how uneven access to screening, treatment, and support still is.

The answer, as exhausting as it sounds, is to lean in.

To advocate harder.
To check on people.
To make the appointment.
To push the insurance company.
To sit with friends in waiting rooms.
To show up for patients even when your own heart feels heavy.

Because grief, for all its devastation, is also proof of connection.

We mourn because we love.
We fight because we care.
We stay present because skipping ahead means abandoning the people still here beside us.

And I am not willing to do that.

Not for my family.
Not for my friends.
Not for my patients.
Not for the people whose stories don’t make headlines but matter just as much.

The world feels fragile right now.
But maybe the response to fragility isn’t escape.

Maybe it’s tenderness.
Maybe it’s vigilance.
Maybe it’s doing better as a system, as a profession, as a society so fewer families have to write posts like this in the future.

I’m wrecked.
But I’m here.
And I’m not looking away.