So my sister-in-law's father passed away yesterday with no warning, heart attack alone at his work, discovered by a passer-by after he'd already gone, all the awful things. He was in his early sixties, about my own dad's age, and while he wasn't exactly in fighting form he wasn't ill either. I'd had dinner with him, his wife, and some other members of their family at my brother's house only Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before he died.

I've known people who died before, people perhaps even one or two degrees closer to home, but this came as a particular shock. Partly it's the "but I just saw him!" feeling, and partly it's that my sister-in-law is also a friend, and very close to my age besides, and partly it's that my dad *has* had heart troubles complete with a dramatic near-death close call several years back and a newly installed pacemaker as of last year.

What's strange to me is how reality closes in as time passes after a sudden death. In the first breathless seconds after I got the news my mind oscillated a little wildly between grasping the fact - he has died, he is dead, he is gone - and resisting it - it can't be that simple, it can't be that fast, there is a mistake. Death snapped him up so abruptly, and yet of course all death is sudden: life is there, and then it isn't. Someone is, and then they're not.

They've had all their lasts, perhaps unbeknownst to them: their last meal, their last thought, their last laugh, their last hug, their last glimpse of their spouse. As L's lasts went, so far as I was around for them, they weren't terrible ones. He had a very nice Easter dinner cooked by his youngest daughter. He spent most of his last full day in the company of his two youngest grandchildren, and a good chunk of time on his iPad Facetiming with his other two grandchildren across the country. He watched the last round of the PGA Masters in HD. He chatted with my dad about plans for the summer. It was all part of an ordinary day, albeit a holiday, but it takes on a new weight in hindsight.

But that's death from the other side of it, and we are the ones on this side, the near side. Families are spread out and scattered and going about their lives where they are living, and then grief comes. It's like they're standing on a giant's fingertips, so distant from each other that they forget they're connected by the ground underfoot, until that connection dulls to a faint pleasant undertone in life -- but then grief comes, and the fist clenches and they are tumbled together, struggling to breathe but glad to rediscover each other in that tight horrific place.

To balance the lasts, the firsts: the first time a wife goes to bed a widow; the first time a daughter wakes up in a world where her father is gone; the first sunrise without him, the first big world event, the first child born. It's a weird and unwelcome finality, death, it's an immutable line drawn in the sand. The past is always past, but it has a different quality when a possibility is so irrevocably stripped away.

I think we can only take grief in those little steps, little spirals outwards from the event horizon itself. It's odd that even to me, the shock settles a little every time I hear someone else, someone new, mention the death. A post on a Facebook wall makes it more real -- how's that for bereavement in the digital age? For some part of my mind, it becomes truer as the news ripples further afield, which is bizarre because of course he's been dead since the moment he died. Why should the weight of more people knowing about it make it more true? I don't know, but it does. It's entropy, that helpless learned feeling that what's been done cannot be undone -- or more accurately in this case, what's been undone cannot be done again. The more people know, the more people can never unknow.

So that's me today, a bystander on the far edge of grief. Everyone go hug someone you love.