When I think of the word “heartbreak,” I think of lost love. I think of the rug-pulled-out-from-under-you kind of breakup or the kind of love that never even got the chance to see the light of day. I think of me at 13 years old, crying in the middle school bathroom over some boy I thought was truly “the one.”

I think I speak for most of us when I say that we learned the definition of heartbreak before we even knew what it felt like. But I have come to the bitter conclusion that heartbreak is violently versatile. As a matter of fact, I learned this lesson when I was 11, but seeing as that I so young at the time I didn’t realize that the empty feeling in my chest was actually my broken heart demanding to be noticed. I sat in a pew of some extravagant church in northern Iowa. My family had driven us eight hours the night before on very short notice because, obviously, you can’t really plan funerals weeks in advance. My grandpa had passed away two nights prior so the wounds were still fresh. I watched the service unfold in front of me, hardly picking up what was happening. I looked up at my father who stood in the center of the church next to his brother and suddenly the man that embodied the strength of my family, the man that I look up to more than anyone, was standing in front of a room full of people that loved his father dearly and was beginning to cry.

I have only seen my father cry once, and it was that day. That was the day my heart broke, and I realized then that the world can break anyone it wishes to.

I remember being 6 years old and running barefoot down our cul de sac. I remember the hot flash of pain spreading through my foot as I stubbed my toe on the pavement. My grandpa approached me. “Give me your arm,” he said and pinched it. “Now you don’t feel the pain in your toe anymore” he smiled, and we both erupted in laughter. It was funny then, in a sort of twisted way.

Only now the universe seems to think that it can apply the same logic to coping with death, piling up the bodies. But they all still hurt just the same.

There are times when all I can think about is how horrible this world really is, how people are dying—good people are dying. And I think about how I can’t keep turning on the news only to see the smiling faces of the newly deceased. I can’t keep reading the newspaper if I am only going to see the wreckage that has been created. I begin to ask myself, “if all the good people in this world keep getting taken away, who’s going to be left?” I am constantly reminded of the unpredictability surrounding our lives and perhaps that has made me bitter. But I have been heartbroken by those who have made an exit from this life before they were ready, and what I have learned is that the only way I am able to find solace in these departures is to believe that they will be okay. The truth is, I don’t have the answer to where people go after they die. But I think the reason why I believe in Heaven is because it hurts less knowing that they are okay, that they are happy wherever they are.

The words I didn’t take the time to say, the memories I didn’t get the chance to make, the plans that I made in my head used to haunt me and I became complacent. I believed that the world owed me time, that I had time to spare.

But here’s the truth, my friends:

Life is fragile, it can be snatched from us at any given moment. Sometimes we can see the finish line before we cross it and sometimes the end is even a blessing. But sometimes the end arrives prematurely. Sometimes we lose the bookmark and can’t find the page we left off on. Sometimes we lose the book altogether. Life is fleeting, and there is never any certainty in the equation. The world owes us nothing and none of us are invincible. So we have to hold our loved ones close, we have to tell them we love them—even if you think they already know, even if you have told them thousands of times before. Because when it’s all over, that’s it.

You don’t get to remind them.