Pope Francis died on a Monday, or perhaps it was a Thursday—I’m not sure anymore. The calendar insists on its version, but you know mourning has its own logic. It moves in its own way, subterranean, like the 6 train in New York at rush hour, barrelling past Grand Central while no one looks up, and you’re the only one who can feel the grief rumbling through the tunnels beneath your ribs.

It doesn’t matter what day it was, not really, because death rearranges time the way grief rewrites memory: slowly, and without asking for permission.

His passing was not loud, not tragic in the way we usually measure tragedy. There were no ruptures, only a soft exhale that moved through the corridors of the world like incense in a chapel.

He had always seemed like someone rehearsing for death—not out of fear, but familiarity, as if he had long ago made peace with impermanence and decided to live as if the ending were already stitched into every beginning.

He reminded me of Montaigne’s quiet conviction: to philosophize is to learn how to die. Not because death is an obsession, but because the wise learn to live in its shadow without flinching.

Pope Francis, like the rarest kind of teachers, did not teach us how to avoid death, or even how to delay it, but how to carry it with grace, how to soften around it, to let its inevitability knead us into something more tender, more lucid.

In the way he spoke about mercy, about fracture, about the invisible burdens we each cradle in our arms like newborns—he wasn’t just preaching religion. He was offering emotional permission. Because so often—in religion, in society, even in grief—we’re told to toughen up, to hold it together, to make meaning despite the pain.

But he flipped that.

He offered permission to live with softness because of pain and death, not in defiance of them. That’s what made it powerful. He gave people the emotional clearance to stop pretending. To carry their sorrow honestly. To live tenderly, and still be whole.

Camus would have called it rebellion—the gentle defiance of loving the world despite its absurdity. Dostoevsky might have seen in Pope Francis a reflection of Prince Myshkin, the holy fool whose goodness becomes unbearable to the world because it illuminates its cruelty too starkly. And Kahlil Gibran, with his prose that slips between light and wound, might have said that this man had already died many small deaths before the final one, and that each one taught him how to live more honestly.

There is a certain temperament among the kind, a slowness to anger, a quickness to listen—not out of timidity, but because they understand, in some wordless way, that life is already loud.

The truly kind do not demand to be remembered; they live as if memory itself is not the point. Instead, they pour themselves into moments: the way they linger at the edge of someone else’s pain without trying to fix it, the way they hold silence like it’s a second language. And perhaps that is why they die first—not because they are disposable, but because they’ve already accomplished what the rest of us are still searching for.

Camus wrote that the only serious philosophical question is whether to take one’s own life. But what he meant was not a glorification of despair—it was a challenge: to look squarely into the absurdity of existence and still choose to live. To live not in denial of death, but in defiance of meaninglessness. In this way, his philosophy becomes less about suicide and more about resistance against numbness, against the sleepwalk of comfort, against the industrialization of distraction.

You see it every morning on the train: eyes fixed on screens, headphones pressed like armor, faces half-lit in blue. We are surrounded by life, and yet most of us move through it like ghosts trying not to disturb the furniture. Camus would call this philosophical laziness: the refusal to confront the question at the center of all questions—what is a life for? What is worth suffering for? What, if anything, would make us unafraid to die?

Pope Francis, in his quiet way, seemed to answer this not with rhetoric, but with a kind of radical presence. His days were marked not by urgency but by attention: to children, to the poor, to silence, to prayer. In a world addicted to speed and spectacle, he slowed down. He became an interruption to the machine. He lived like someone who had already made peace with the absurd—and therefore, did not need to be distracted from it.

And perhaps this is the lesson. That the way to meet death is not through the accumulation of achievements, but through the cultivation of awareness. That life is not about escape, but encounter. That meaning is not something we discover in the abstract, but something we make, again and again, in the tiniest choices: to listen instead of scroll, to forgive instead of win, to love even when it costs us.

Have you ever noticed how strange it is that we call it a “good day” when we’ve crossed off every task on a list we didn’t write with our soul?

You wake up, scroll, eat, commute, reply to messages you don’t mean, laugh politely at something on a screen, post a photo, delete it, re-upload it with a better caption. And somehow, you go to bed feeling like you were everywhere and yet nowhere at all.

We’ve normalized a rhythm of living that confuses activity with meaning. We chase productivity as if it’s proof that we’re valuable.

But I wonder, what if the way we live is actually making it harder to die well?

Kahlil Gibran once wrote that life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one. And maybe that’s not meant to be beautiful, maybe it’s meant to be unsettling. Because if our days are a rehearsal for our final breath, then what are we rehearsing? For many of us, it’s performance. Exhaustion. Avoidance. We learn to be busy, but not to be still. We learn to chase, but not to arrive.

Pope Francis lived with a certain slowness that made you trust he wasn’t trying to outrun anything. He didn’t perform holiness. He wasn’t trying to be perceived, he was trying to be present. And maybe that’s why he made people feel safe. Because there was nothing to prove.

So maybe we need to ask ourselves: what if dying well isn’t about grand legacies or heroic final moments, but about the quiet truth that we lived the ordinary days with clarity, with love, with attention?

What if being truly alive has nothing to do with doing more, proving more, achieving more—but everything to do with how much of your raw, breakable self you’re willing to lay bare in this very moment?

And then, there is Dostoevsky, who never looked away. Not from the horror, not from the holiness. He wrote from the underside of human experience, from prison cells and dim alleyways, from the tremble of faith and the fever of guilt. He knew, better than most, that the soul doesn’t live in the sanitized, well-lit corners of life—it lives in the dissonance, in the ache, in the unbearable contradictions we carry and conceal.

Have you ever wondered why, even when we have everything we thought we needed, something still aches quietly in the background? That soft throb that no accomplishment can soothe?

Dostoevsky might’ve said it’s because we are not meant to be satisfied. We are meant to be whole. And wholeness, unlike happiness, is not sterile. It is messy. It includes the doubt. The jealousy. The contradictions. The rage. The tenderness. The guilt we wish we could scrub off. The forgiveness we haven’t yet earned.

In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), he writes, “What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.” And maybe that’s what makes death so terrifying—not the end of breath, but the fear that we’ve lived without ever really opening ourselves.

Pope Francis was no stranger to this inner trial. His sermons were not performances of perfection. They were trembling attempts to name the invisible. To remind us that belief is not certainty, it’s fidelity to something we may never fully grasp. He carried his own contradictions with grace, not because he had resolved them, but because he had befriended them. That, perhaps, is what holiness really looks like.

So then, what does it mean to die well?

Maybe it’s not about a perfect moral record. Maybe it’s not about saying all the right things or being remembered by many. Maybe to die well is to die known—by at least one person. And before that, by yourself. Maybe it’s to look back and say, I lived with my heart turned outward. I lived through the storm of my own soul and did not close the door on it.

Maybe the measure of a life is not how cleanly it ends, but how deeply it reached.

And if that’s true, then we still have time. We are still, astonishingly, alive.

Maybe that’s what these figures have been trying to show us all along that death, in its truest form, isn’t the end of something but the reflection of how we lived. Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy; perhaps he meant that defiance, too, can be tender. Dostoevsky’s faith emerged from the abyss, and Gibran’s sorrow bloomed into scripture.

The people who teach us how to die are not always saints. They are not always the ones who lived perfectly, loved unconditionally, or spoke with wisdom. Sometimes, they are the ones who have failed loudly and loved badly—the ones who’ve said the wrong thing, chosen the easy way out, and hurt the people they meant to protect. Sometimes, they are simply human—exhausted, messy, ashamed—but still, they try, quietly, to live with some decency in a world that often doesn’t reward it.

In an age that celebrates performance over presence, speed over stillness, and self-interest over sincerity, it’s easy to forget that goodness can look quiet. Clumsy. Incomplete. But that doesn’t make it any less real. And maybe that’s what we need to understand. Not an easy path, but the courage to stumble through it. The people who teach us how to die, with all their flaws and failures, remind us that it’s the trying that matters. The choosing, again and again, to face the world, however broken it might be.