The Ether

The news came with a smile,

your father’s lips curved,  

as if the words were light,  

as if the weight of them  

hadn’t yet settled in his chest.  

He’s dying, he said,  

and the room stayed quiet,  

but for the sound of your sister  

breathing beside you,  

her breath catching,  

your breath stopping.  

You’d only met him once,

the old man in the village,  

legless from a childhood  

of polio,  

yet moving like the earth itself  

was his to command,  

his hands rough as the soil  

he turned each day,  

guiding him across the farm  

when the wheelchair grew too heavy,  

too distant from the land.

But he made an impact,

not with words,  

but with the way he lived,  

the way he carved a life  

from the dust and the dry heat,  

from the impossibility  

of his own body.  

You watched him once,  

pushing through the fields,  

his hands the only anchor  

between him and the sky,  

and you wondered  

how a man could grow so tall  

without standing.

And now he was dying,

and your father smiled,  

as if death was just another season,  

another crop to harvest.  

But you and your sister,  

you cried—  

cried for the man  

who had shown you strength  

in the quietest of ways,  

who had lived more in his stillness  

than others did on two legs.  

The room did not understand,  

why your tears fell like rain  

on a dry, unyielding day,  

why grief settled into your bones  

for a man you barely knew.  

But you knew,  

you knew that in that single meeting,  

he had planted something in you,  

something that took root,  

something that would not die  

just because he was leaving.

And so you cried,

because he had been more  

than just a man,  

more than just your grandfather,  

he had been a reminder  

that life is not measured  

by the steps we take,  

but by the ground we hold,  

by the love we leave behind  

in the hands that remember us,  

even when the rest of the world  

smiles and moves on.