Maya had never known a week could feel so heavy.
Since her grandfather’s passing, yet every hour still carried the echo of that night, the night she had sat beside him, unaware she was witnessing his final sunset.
She remembered walking into his room, the air thick with the scent of balm and quiet suffering. His breaths were slow, strained, as if each inhale was a small battle. Maya had always thought she would be strong enough for this moment. She wasn’t. Not even close.
But she tried. She did what her heart knew best.
She placed her hand over his cold but familiar and began to recite Yaasin. Her voice trembled at first, then steadied as she recited Quran softly into the dim room, asking Allah to ease his pain, to make his journey gentle. She didn’t imagine, not for a second, that this was the last night she would do so. She only wanted him not to suffer anymore. His discomfort felt like knives in her own chest. Watching him struggle was unbearable.
So she prayed for ease.
She never realized she was also praying for goodbye.
When she finished reciting, exhaustion tugged at her, but fear held her awake. She was too scared to sleep, too scared to leave her grandfather alone, even for a moment. What if he needed her? What if she missed something? What if this night, this quiet, heavy night was more important than she understood?
She looked at her grandfather’s still face, pale under the soft yellow light, and something inside her broke.
To keep herself awake, and to stop her hands from shaking, she reached for something she had bought earlier that day, a wooden flower craft, like a tiny wooden Lego. It was supposed to be a simple decorative thing, something she had thought he might like.
She sat at the small table beside his bed and began assembling it piece by piece. The wood was stiff; her fingers were trembling. Every snap of a part locking into place hurt. Every small mistake made her throat tighten. But she kept going.
She kept going because she wanted to place it next to him in the morning. Because she hoped he would open his eyes and see it, this small flower that would never wilt, a symbol of her wish for him to live a long life. A flower that lasted, because she wanted him to last.
It kept her awake. It kept her steady. It kept her hopeful.
But somehow… he never got the chance to see it.
The world did not return the way she had expected. Her grandfather never opened his eyes. The little wooden flower sat finished on the bedside table, waiting, like her. But the man she built it for was already gone. The hope she had placed in every piece vanished into a silence too cruel to describe.
The grief that followed was unlike anything she’d ever felt. A deep, ripping hollowness. She cried that night, cried so hard she didn’t recognize the sound coming from her own chest. And Fin saw all of it. He stood by her side, steady and quiet, watching her collapse under a heartbreak she never thought she’d experience. He didn’t try to stop her. He didn’t tell her to be strong. He simply stayed.
Now, Maya walked through her days like a ghost in her own life. She smiled with people. She nodded. She spoke normally. She hid everything so well that no one suspected the storm still raging inside her.
But when she was alone, when the world quieted and no one asked anything of her, the truth came pouring out. Her tears returned, heavy and uncontrollable. She longed for her grandfather’s voice, his warmth, his presence. She longed for the moment she never got, the moment he would wake up and see her flower.
People told her time would heal. She did not believe them. Not yet.
For now, the grief still lived close to her skin. She carried it gently, like something fragile, hidden from the world but held tightly against her heart.
She missed him deeply.
And that missing, she realized, was just another form of love, one that lasts, just like the flower she made for him.
-AMS