A waiting room I long reserved

Aevandrion Eryndor

It is quite unsettling to choose a place for a day we will never witness ourselves.

Somewhere between the signatures on a document and the payment for a plot of land, we are asked to confront a truth we spend our lives avoiding: that one day, the air that once filled our lungs will cease to leave, the blood that circulates our body will stop moving, the brain that once controlled every inch of our being will inevitably die out, and the life we live will rest in either a box or an urn—too little to contain the vast memories we cherished.

That is why a burial reservation, an arrangement made for the inevitable, is more than a transaction with a cemetery. It is an appointment with mortality, a small patch of earth claimed in anticipation of the day our bodies return to it.

We reserve seats for concerts we hope to attend, rooms for vacations we long to take, and tables for dinners we have yet to share. Yet reserving a place beneath the ground feels different. It is to acknowledge that the story we are writing will, eventually, reach its final page, even if we have not decided how the next chapter should begin.

We live as though time were an inexhaustible inheritance.

We postpone conversations, swallow apologies, and promise ourselves that there will always be another Sunday, another birthday, and another chance to sit beside the people we love.

We measure our lives in calendars and clocks, forgetting that neither can guarantee us another morning. The sun rises with such dependable indifference that we mistake its return for its promise that it will always be there. 

But time does not bargain. It moves through the laughter at our dinner tables, the wrinkles gathering around our parents’ eyes, and to those who will one day become strangers to their younger selves. Without announcing its departure, it takes the ordinary moments we barely notice and turns them into memories we would give anything to revisit.

And somewhere, perhaps only a few streets away, a cemetery receives another name, another life, another reminder that the distance between someday and too late is never ours to measure.

Death, after all, does not need to knock loudly to remind us that it exists. It has always been waiting at our doorstep, patient as dusk, requiring no invitation and offering no appointment we can reschedule.

It stands at the edge of every celebration, not to diminish our joy, but to remind us why joy matters. To acknowledge death is not to surrender to it. Neither is it to spend our days rehearsing our departure. Rather, it is to understand that the value of a life lies partly in its limitations. 

Perhaps the purpose of recognizing our mortality is not to learn how to die, but to learn how to live without treating our time as something guaranteed.

A burial reservation may secure a place for our remains, but it cannot reserve a place in the hearts of those we leave behind. No deed can guarantee that we will be remembered, no payment can purchase an extension of the hours already spent, and no carefully chosen plot can contain the entirety of a life. 

What remains beyond the soil is what we have given while we were here: the kindness we offered, the courage we lent, and the ordinary afternoons we made extraordinary simply by being present.

When our names are eventually carved into stone, the people who knew us will remember more than the dates between them. They will remember how we made a room feel livelier, how our voices sounded across a familiar table, and how the world was, for a little while, different because we had lived in it.

Maybe, then, there is tenderness in reserving a final resting place. It is a practical act shaped by an extraordinary realization: that our bodies belong to time, and time eventually returns everything it lends. Yet we need to not let the knowledge of an ending turn the present into a waiting room.

We can still plant trees whose shade we may never sit beneath, mend the relationships we have neglected, tell our parents we love them while their voices still answer, and pursue the dreams we have repeatedly postponed for a more convenient tomorrow.

We can stop saving our gratitude for funerals and our affection for last goodbyes. The earth will keep its reservation whether we spend today afraid of it or grateful for the life unfolding above it.

And one day, the place we have reserved may finally receive us.

The grass will grow, the seasons will change, and the world will continue its days and business. There will be mornings we will not see and stories we will not hear, and somewhere, life will carry on without our knowing.

We are here for a little while, entrusted with a handful of ordinary miracles, and then we must leave them behind. The question is not whether death will find our doorstep, but what we will have done with the life that preceded its arrival.

After all, we may prepare a place for the day we return to the earth, but while we are still here, we must remember to make a life worth having lived.