The End Where We Begin

The first time Elias wrote about death, he was twenty-three and invincible.

A young writer with too many thoughts and not enough pages, he scribbled essays about grief, eulogies for strangers, and poems that dressed loss in metaphors. People read them, cried over them, and thanked him. Somehow, he’d made death seem less frightening. Like it was just another step in the human story.

“Your words helped me through my mother’s passing,” one reader had written.

“I never feared death until I read your work. And now, I fear it less.”

But Elias never truly knew death. Not really. Not intimately.

Not until the MRI.

...

“I’m sorry, Mr. Vale,” the doctor had said, carefully folding her hands. “It’s a brain tumor. Glioblastoma. Advanced.”

The words echoed in his skull like a cruel joke written in a language he didn’t want to translate.

“How long?” Elias asked quietly.

The doctor’s face softened. “Months. Maybe a year.”

...

In the weeks that followed, Elias stopped writing.

The man who’d penned a hundred essays on loss suddenly couldn’t find a single sentence for himself.

He stared at blank pages, waiting for the wisdom that had once come so easily. But all he felt was betrayal.

“I helped people accept this,” he said bitterly to his sister one afternoon. “I made death sound… poetic.”

Mira placed a warm hand on his. “That’s because you believed in life. Not in death.”

He didn’t reply.

...

He fought, of course.

Chemo. Trials. Acupuncture. Meditation. Juicing kale and praying to stars.

There were good days.

Days when he almost forgot.

He’d laugh with friends, cook pasta badly, watch old movies until dawn. And then there were days when the pain curled around his spine like smoke and stole his words from the inside out.

But what crushed him most wasn’t the tumor.

It was silence.

He could no longer write about death. Not when it stared at him each morning in the mirror. He didn’t know how to make it beautiful anymore.

Until the park.

...

It was a cloudy afternoon. Autumn had just begun brushing the leaves with gold.

Elias sat on a bench, wrapped in a scarf Mira had knit for him, watching the world move without him.

That’s when he saw them.

Two children—maybe six, maybe seven—running barefoot in the grass. A boy and a girl, playing a made-up game that had no rules and even less purpose. They screamed with laughter, their faces red with joy. The boy fell and scraped his knee, but got up smiling. The girl gave him a leaf like it was treasure.

Elias watched them, tears in his eyes.

They didn’t know about tumors.

They didn’t know about bills or funerals or time running out.

And they didn’t need to.

They were living. Fully. Freely. Without needing permission.

Something inside Elias softened.

“Maybe,” he whispered, “I don’t need to understand it. Maybe I just need to feel it.”

...

That night, he picked up his pen again.

Not to explain death.

But to remember life.

He began writing what would become his final book: The Last Chapter. A memoir, not of dying, but of all the things that made life worth it—the taste of strawberries in June, the smell of old books, the thrill of a first kiss, the ache of heartbreak, the warmth of laughter.

“I thought I knew death,” he wrote, “but I barely knew life. It’s not made of answers. It’s made of moments.”

The pages came faster than ever before. Each sentence pulsed with honesty. He wrote through pain. Through tears. Through silence.

He wrote until the very last line.

...

The memoir was published two months later.

It became a quiet miracle—a book people passed to loved ones, left by hospital beds, carried in trembling hands to funerals and birth rooms.

Elias died the day after it was released.

In his sleep.

Peacefully.

Surrounded by friends, his sister, old letters, and the smell of coffee and ink. His hand was resting near the book, as if he’d just closed it.

And though his eyes never opened again, everyone said he looked like he was smiling.

...

The epilogue of The Last Chapter reads:

Life is worth living in the sunny or rainy days, because life is more than just happiness and no tears. Life is a rainbow bled by every emotion—the pain, the joy, the confusion, the wonder. That’s what it means to live. To feel all of it. To know it was real. And to be grateful for the storm, because it showed you how bright you could shine.