Scrolling through these old threads feels like picking at a scab that refused to heal 3 years ago. I’m sitting in a plastic chair that squeaks every time I breathe, holding a smartphone that belongs to a man who died 23 minutes before I clocked in. My name is Riley D.R., and as a hospice volunteer coordinator, I spend a lot of time in the wreckage of other people’s digital lives. Usually, it’s a mess of unanswered emails and half-written drafts that will never see the light of a sent folder. We have this collective delusion that life ends with a period, a neat little dot that signals the completion of a thought. But it doesn’t. It ends like an abrupt disconnection during a tunnel, a jagged edge that cuts anyone who tries to smooth it out. I’m looking at his last text. It was a complaint about the soup. Not a grand farewell. Just a note about too much salt, sent to a daughter who was likely 13 miles away in a grocery store aisle.
We are the sum of our unfinished business.
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The False Comfort of Closure
I’ve been reading my own messages lately, too. Texts from 2013, back when I thought I knew what ‘ending’ meant. I was so arrogant then. I used to














