From 'Lives interrupted ...' By Santosh Desai

(Context : The tragic crash of flight AI-171 in Ahmedabad) 

....And what of those who vanish from our lives without warning—not celebrities, not news stories, but people we love? People who anchor us, who shape the texture of our daily lives, who make the hours make sense? People who are such an essential part of our lives in the most ordinary way possible? 

How do we absorb the fact of their disappearance? It feels like a rip in the fabric of the world. Not just loss, but a kind of theft. We don’t just grieve them—we grieve the version of ourselves that existed in their company. Their absence is not silence, it is noise. A ringing emptiness that feels not just painful but fundamentally undeserved. The world continues, but something essential no longer does, and only a few seem to notice. The person is gone, and with them, the laughter in a room, the private language, the everyday sacred. How does one live with love that has nowhere left to go ?

And yet, in that silence, we sometimes hear the faint crackle of our own illusions breaking. The belief that we are in control. That we have time. That we will always get to finish our sentences.

Perhaps that is why such moments disturb us so deeply. They remind us that not every life ends with closure. Some end in motion. In anticipation. In the middle of laughter or sleep or a long journey. And while that truth is hard to accept, it is also real. Sometimes stories end in mid.