bhaskar saikia

Yesterday, as I was returning from my professor’s funeral, the world felt unusually heavy. Grief has a strange way of slowing everything down, softening the edges of reality until all you’re left with is a quiet ache. The entire journey back, I sat in silence—still trying to accept the truth that I would never meet him again. Someone who had shaped my thinking, my ethics, my way of seeing the world, was suddenly gone.

The cab driver had music playing the whole time, but I wasn’t really listening. Everything sounded distant, like a muffled soundtrack behind my thoughts. And then, out of nowhere, one familiar line pierced through that fog:

“My father told me, someday you’ll leave this world behind…”
— Avicii, The Nights

It is one of my favourite songs, but in that moment, it felt as though it had been placed there just for me. A message. A reminder. A hand on the shoulder.

Those words echoed inside me, louder than the grief I had been holding onto. As the song continued, something shifted. I found myself closing my eyes, letting the music wash over the sorrow, and in that brief moment, a quiet realization emerged: Death is not the end of a life—only the end of a presence.

What truly matters is the life lived between those two fragile boundaries of birth and death. The choices made. The kindness shown. The questions raised. The courage to be honest, to be generous, to be human.

My professor lived like that. He left behind a trail of goodness—lessons, encouragement, respect, humanity—that no death could erase. And perhaps that is the true measure of a life: Not its length, but its legacy.

Sitting in that moving cab, I realized that grief and gratitude often sit side by side. One reminds us of what we’ve lost; the other reminds us of what we’ve gained because someone like him once walked this world.

I may never meet him again, but I will meet his teachings every day—in how I think, how I speak, how I treat others, and in the choices I make with whatever time I have.

And maybe that is what Avicii was trying to say all along: “One day, you’ll leave this world behind, So live a life you will remember.“

When you leave this world behind, make sure you leave something that never dies.

My professor did.

And I hope, in my own small way, I will too, one day.