There are phrases that land like thunder and others that seep in like ink. “Dying is the longest verb” does both. When Alok Vaid-Menon said those five words, it was not just a poetic turn of phrase—it was a metaphysical sledgehammer dressed in velvet. It was tender, ferocious, and utterly unignorable. And it refused to sit still in my mind. It moved, stretched, echoed. It became a mirror I could not look away from. Because dying, when you really sit with it, is not a moment. It is not a comma between health and absence. It is not the last act in a five-part play. It is the whole script, written backwards and forward in every breath we take. Dying is not an event. It is a condition. It is the longest verb because it begins the moment we do. And it never stops.

We do not like to admit that. The myth of linear time—birth, youth, climax, fade, end—is easier to live inside. Easier, but dishonest. What Alok does, so gracefully and so devastatingly, is expose our dependence on that dishonest ease. They refuse to let us live in tidy binaries: life here, death there; alive now, dead later. Instead, they tell the truth. The real truth. The uncomfortable truth. That we are dying right now. All of us. Even as we laugh, cook, make love, or post photos with filters that pretend to stall time. Even as we birth new dreams or scream at injustice or fall asleep in someone’s arms. We are dying. Still breathing, still loving, still wanting, but dying just the same.

This truth, once accepted, does not depress me. It calms me. Because if dying is the longest verb, then I am not behind schedule. I am not failing. I am not late to my own life. I am precisely where I should be—in the sacred process of unraveling, unfolding, unbecoming and becoming again. Dying is a motion. A dance. A reach for something no one will ever fully grasp. And somehow, in that reach, we become most human.

There is beauty in verbs. They are active. They suggest movement. And dying, unlike death, does not ask for stillness. It asks for awareness. For participation. For courage. Death is the noun, the full stop. But dying? Dying is grammar in motion. It is the ongoing syntax of existence. It is how we conjugate meaning in the face of impermanence. Dying is breathing while knowing breath will one day leave. It is loving while knowing loss is inevitable. It is creating with the full knowledge that entropy will reclaim everything we build. That is what makes it the longest verb. Not because it is slow—but because it encompasses everything.

For the marginalized—those who live at the jagged intersections of gender, race, queerness, disability, poverty—the verb of dying takes on even more dimensions. For some of us, dying is not abstract. It is not poetic. It is political. It is intimate. It is policy. It is threat and reality all at once. We are taught that our lives are disposable long before we are ever close to death’s door. Dying becomes something we are told we are already doing—by being too much, too loud, too brown, too queer, too trans, too nonconforming, too inconvenient. When Alok speaks of dying as the longest verb, they are also telling the story of survival. Of choosing tenderness in a world that feeds on brutality. Of choosing visibility in a culture that romanticizes our erasure.

And so dying, paradoxically, becomes the most radical thing we can admit to doing. Because it calls bullshit on permanence. It calls bullshit on power. It calls bullshit on supremacy, legacy, and every lie that tries to make us feel less human for simply being human. Dying levels the field. It reminds us that everything—every system, every empire, every delusion of invincibility—will pass. And in the face of that truth, the question becomes: what will we do with the verb?

Will we rush through it, numb ourselves, pretend it is not happening? Will we try to hoard time, attention, pleasure, youth? Or will we lean in? Will we listen? Will we love? Will we risk looking foolish? Will we cry without apology, apologize without pride, forgive without leverage? Will we write poems that no one reads, or grow gardens that no one tends? Will we sit beside each other and speak the unspeakable—about endings, regrets, tenderness, and terror?

When I hear Alok say “Dying is the longest verb,” I also hear them asking: Who taught you to be afraid of verbs? Who told you that only nouns were worth becoming? Who convinced you that you were only alive when things were solid, certain, fixed? Why do you flinch when someone reminds you that softness is fleeting?

We talk about legacy as if it is an antidote to dying. We build monuments, publish books, chase awards, raise children. We want to be remembered. We want to matter. But what if the real legacy is in how we verb? Not in what we leave behind, but in how we exist while we are still here. Not in what we finish, but in how we carry the not-quite-finished parts of ourselves and each other. What if our dying is not something to outwit but something to honor?

And what if grief is the echo of that verb? Grief is not a mistake. It is not the opposite of healing. It is the evidence that we verbed well. That we risked connection. That we allowed ourselves to be changed by another’s presence, and then shattered by their absence. Grief is proof that dying, long as it may be, is worth it.

So many of us are afraid of being forgotten. But dying—as verb, not noun—offers a different frame. You are not being forgotten. You are being changed. You are participating in the great unfolding. The slow dissolve of the self back into source. You are not disappearing. You are transforming. Like water into mist. Like language into silence.

When Alok writes or speaks about death, about transness, about decay and desire and devotion, they do so with the fierce clarity of someone who has tasted grief and still chooses softness. Someone who has witnessed cruelty and still dares to love. Someone who has been misnamed and still writes their own name into every breath. That is the power of dying as a verb—it lets us write our lives in the tense of becoming.

You may not feel ready to think of yourself as dying. That is okay. But you are. We all are. And instead of that being a threat, maybe it can be a relief. A return. A way back to the things that actually matter. To the people who never needed you to be perfect—just present. To the moments that do not last forever, but last enough to change you.

So let us learn to die well. Not just at the end, but now. Let us die to ego. Die to control. Die to the fantasy of permanence. Let us die to the shallow lives we were told to chase, and live more fully in the verb. Let us speak dying out loud. Let us cradle it in our mouths. Let us conjugate it through our laughter, our apologies, our art, our protest, our healing.

Dying is the longest verb. So do not waste it.

Let it stretch you. Let it soften you. Let it show you who you really are.

Because it already has.

Follow Alok’s work. Read their poetry. Sit with their talks. Share their words. Not as soundbites, but as sacred text. And then ask yourself what verbs define your life. Are you rushing toward a noun that never comes? Or are you learning how to be with the truth of becoming, unraveling, and tenderly, fiercely, beautifully dying?