Answer this question before you die

Brian Sankarsingh thinks about life, worth and death

Photo by The Good Funeral Guide on Unsplash

I watched the funeral service for my cousin today. She was two years younger than me. Beside her sister and her son no one else got up to speak. She lay there so beautiful. She was always full of life and energy. But now that energy has been dissipated into the universe. She is now one with the atoms from which she first came.

I sat there and felt the weight of that vulgar silence. The people who loved her were in the room, but very few words were spoken aloud. Two people stood up, shared what they could, then sat down. The service moved on. The program had to be followed. The day had to be completed.

But something in me refused to move on so easily.

Looking at her, perfectly dressed, perfectly still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how quickly a life can be reduced to a wisp of smoke. A few people speak. A few stories are told. Then the lid closes. The flowers get taken away. People go back to their routines and in that moment, with my cousin lying there so beautiful and yet so undeniably gone, a question rose up and wouldn’t let me go: Why am I fighting so hard with life? Because I do fight. Every. Single. Day. I work. I manage my household and my family finances. I manage my relationships. I manage my writing. Selling and marketing and promoting my books. I organize, I plan, I show up, I handle things. I am the one who makes sure nothing falls apart. My family could care less about those things as long as they’re done and they’re not inconvenienced.

But that’s the part that stings. It’s not that they hate me. It’s not that they don’t like what I do. It’s that my work, my effort, my careful juggling of everything, is mostly invisible unless something goes wrong. As long as the bills are paid, the food appears, the emotions are managed then everything is “fine.” I am sure many of you reading this could identify with this. Or. Maybe I am just a stupid old man rambling on.

Yet sitting there virtually watching my cousin’s funeral, I suddenly heard myself ask: Is that therefore all that I am? Is that my worth as a person? As a human being?

It’s a dangerous question, because once you ask it honestly, you can’t un-hear the answer. I realized how much of my life is defined by what I do for other people. I am useful. I am dependable. I am the one who holds things together, often quietly, often alone. When I write, I don’t just write; I market, I sell, I promote. I stand behind my books and push them out into a world that may or may not care. Even there, I’m managing the results, the reach, the reactions.

But who is managing me?

At that funeral, my mind jumped ahead to my own. Who will speak for me? What will they say? Will they talk about my soul, my questions, my stubbornness, my dreams, my fears? Will they talk about how I worked hard, how I “did what needed to be done,” how I “took care of things”?

Will they know me, or only what I provided?

It’s a strange thing to admit, but competence can erase you. When you’re good at managing life, people stop seeing the person and only see the outcomes. They see the paid bills, not the anxiety. They see the organized household, not the exhaustion. They see the published books, not the nights you sat there wondering if any of this even matters.

And if they’re comfortable, if they’re not inconvenienced, they don’t ask too many questions. The funeral made that too clear. My cousin, who “was always full of life and energy,” lay there as a lifeless corpse, and the room felt small compared to who she had been. I knew her as more than what was said. I knew pieces of her that didn’t make it into the program. Her laugh. Her frustration. Her sharpness. Her softness. How she teased me about my father giving me the strap one Christmas.

But I also knew this: if no one speaks those parts out loud, the world believes the small version.

The same risk hangs over my own life. Over all our lives. If the people around us never look past what we do for them, we will die having been needed, but not necessarily known. Appreciated, perhaps, but not really seen.

That thought unsettled me more than her death.

So, as I watched the casket, I quietly started taking stock. Who hears my real questions? Who knows what I carry? Who has seen me when I am not performing, not producing, not managing? Who asks about the person behind the roles? The list was shorter than I wanted it to be.

And then another question came, even more uncomfortable than the first: if my worth, in their eyes, is tied to what I do for them, what happens to me when I can’t do it anymore? When I am the one lying still and unable to manage anything? Is my life only meaningful so long as I keep everyone else from being inconvenienced? The logical side of me knows the answer: of course not. A human being is not an appliance, not a service provider, not a collection of completed tasks. A human being has worth simply by being. But the emotional truth is measured in daily life, not in theory. And in daily life, the message is often: you matter most when you are useful.

Sitting at my dining room table watching the ceremony at that chapel, I realized how deeply I’ve internalized that. I’ve worn my usefulness like armor and identity. I agreed, without saying it out loud, to be the one who manages everything. I took it on, partly out of love, partly out of habit, and partly because if I’m honest, being needed can feel like being valued, at least at first. But that feeling has a limit. At some point, the weight of constant responsibility starts to crush the person carrying it. You start to wonder if anyone would make space for you if you dropped the load and said, “I am tired. I am more than this. I need to be seen, not just depended on.”

Grief stripped away the polite answers. It left me staring at my life the way I was staring at my cousin’s body: directly, without distraction.

Why am I fighting so hard with life?

I think part of the answer is fear! I fear what will fall apart if I stop. I fear of being judged. I fear confirming that, to some people, my primary value is in what I provide. But another part of the answer is love. I love for my family, my work, my stories, my responsibilities. The problem is when love and fear combine into a life where I constantly give and rarely receive the one thing I quietly crave: to be known as a whole person, not just a reliable function.

I don’t have a neat resolution to all of this. I shut down the camera and exited the funeral with more questions than answers. But the questions themselves feel like a turning point.

Is that therefore all that I am?
Is that my worth as a person? As a human being?

I can’t control how others see me. I can’t force anyone to step up to the microphone of my life and speak about the parts of me they never bothered to explore. But I can refuse to keep agreeing, in silence, that my worth is equal to my usefulness. I can choose to protect time and energy for the version of me that exists beyond tasks and expectations. I can write not just to sell, market, and promote, but to tell the truth of my own experience. I can try to honor the parts of me that feel invisible in my daily life.

Watching my cousin, two years younger than me, I understood something simple and brutal: life will end whether or not I am ever fully seen. The clock does not pause while I organize everyone else’s comfort. So, if there is any fight worth having with life, maybe it is not the fight to keep everything running smoothly. Maybe it is the fight to live as a full human being in the middle of all that responsibility. To demand, at least from myself, that I do not disappear behind the things I do.

When my own funeral comes, I don’t know who will stand to speak. I don’t know what they will say. But I hope, by then, I will have lived in a way that made it harder for people to reduce me to my usefulness. I hope someone will be able to say, with truth in their voice, that I was not just a manager of life, but a person who insisted on being more than the roles I played. For now, the work starts quietly, with me sitting after a funeral, finally asking myself out loud: Is this all that I am?

And answering, even if no one else hears it, even if it’s for my own sanity the answer MUST be: NO!.

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Bio: Brian Sankarsingh is a poetic firebrand, a sharp, thoughtful storyteller who walks the crossroads where Caribbean folklore, social justice, and the human condition collide. He is a truth-seeker who questions political tribes, challenges lazy platitudes, and writes with a deep pulse of empathy, always pushing for nuance whether you're exploring grief, cultural identity, or the monsters that haunt cane fields and hearts alike. He blends advocacy and art seamlessly. He is part historian, part philosopher, part bard, driven by a hunger to illuminate overlooked stories and empower marginalized voices.

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