"What do you mean you're running out of time" by PQHAÜS

Acrylic on canvas / 16x20 inch / 2026 / PQHAÜS

I think the first time I learned what death was happened when my grandfather passed away. I did not understand the rules of it. I only understood that his body stopped behaving the way it was supposed to. Breathing became difficult. Being awake became exhausting. I watched him fail at things he had done his entire life without thinking, and no one could explain why that failure was permanent. I kept waiting for it to reverse. I kept assuming someone would fix it. I could not accept that a body could simply decide it was finished.

When he told my family that he wanted to prepare for his own ending, he did not dramatize it. He spoke as if he were stating a fact he had already accepted. He said he could feel it happening. He said he was running out of time. I did not know how someone could feel time leaving them. Time still felt loose to me then. It felt like something you always had too much of. The only response I could come up with was practical. If time was what he lacked, then it made sense to share it. I thought my family could give him some of ours. I thought that if enough of us did, it would solve the problem.

That idea stayed with me after he died. It did not evolve or mature into something more reasonable. It simply remained. Since then, there have been more deaths. Some I stood far enough away from to observe without being pulled under. Others came close enough to require some kind of response. Sometimes I stayed silent. Sometimes I wrote letters that had nowhere to go. No address. No expectation. Just proof that I was present and that I noticed when someone disappeared.

What unsettles me is not death itself but the behavior of time after it happens. It does not change. It does not hesitate. It continues at the same pace, indifferent to what has been removed. I still catch myself wanting to interrupt it. To negotiate. To offer pieces of my own time to someone who clearly needed it more than I did. The impulse feels irrational now, but it is honest. It is the most accurate form my grief has ever taken.

Time does not accept these offers. It is not fair and it is not responsive. It does not pause out of respect or redistribute itself out of mercy. It simply moves on. What remains are small gestures that fail to replace what was lost. Letters that are never read. Memories that do not travel anywhere. Words that stay unanswered. They are not enough, but they are all that is left once you understand that time was never something you could give away in the first place.