You've never been much of a believer, but as you stare at the pile of paperwork before you, you cannot help but think:
"Talos, of all the souls you could have taken from us, why this one?"
This was not about whether or not the man was worthy. That was never once in question. It's more of a 'why now?' There was so much he had yet to do. So much he still wanted to give. So many who looked up to him. So many who needed him even now. Who on Nirn was ready to let him go?
It has been weeks since he died. But the wrongness of it all still leaves a bitter taste on your tongue. It simply wasn't fair. You stare angrily at the computer screen before you, full of legal definitions you need to understand to fill out these damnable forms. You're not sure if glaring at the impersonal legalese is any less productive than glaring at the web page it obscures: your inbox full of empty condolences from the various social sites you have been seriously neglecting of late. The rational part of your mind tells you that this behavior isn't healthy. Not that you have a mind to listen. Your brain is easier to ignore than your web browser, though. Even Google seems to think that you're not doing so well, either. Your recent search history has prompted whatever software the tech giant has been using to track your inquiries, to display a profusion of depression-related pop-ups. To be perfectly fair, the months of Googling experimental procedures for terminal illness does look pretty bad. Not mention the end-of-life care and funeral home searches, too. Every group you've worked with has given you "what to do after losing a loved one" pamphlets, as though that was any help. What a fat lot of good they do.
You're not the one who needed help. There should have been more help for when he had been sick. They should have been helping him. Like he would have helped if he could be here now.
There is a choking sound in the room, and you only realize that it came from you when your stupid eyes decided to start leaking. Well, fuck. Here we go again with the waterworks. You thought that you were done with all that pointless crying last week. At least last week you had an excuse. To still be losing it two months after he died was completely fucking useless. Telling yourself that does nothing to stop them tears from coming, though. Pathetic. You know he wouldn't want you to feel this way, that it would have pained him to see you like this, but he's not here anymore, is he? He's dead and gone and buried, and there is nothing you or anyone else can do to change that. Not for lack of trying. It's hard to beat something that modern medicine barely knows enough to classify properly. Harder still when you find that he's lost the medical lottery and gotten something that could kill him in three to five years if he was "lucky". And that's if the slew of complications from this didn't end him first. In actuality, he'd gotten less than two years, the latter part of which could hardly have been called "living".
We should have had more time.
It's always about Time, isn't it? Time for all the things you meant to do, all the things you want to do, time to live, time to laugh, time to love, time to learn, time to simply be…
Time, however, is in short supply at the moment. Those damned papers still need to be completed: the certificate of death still needs to be filed with yet more city officiants (you'd think all those departments would talk to each other, but NO...), the will still needs to be enacted in full, the hospice still needs to be fully compensated, accounts need to be closed, the insurance must be payed out, company policies followed up on… Truly, it was endless. It's kind of impressive really, in a morbid sort of way, just how much paperwork dying and being dead involved. Thankfully, the family lawyers were dealing with the worst of it. The lawyers and his unimpeachable assistant Irileth.