What Remains When Presence Ends

Death doesn’t introduce the question of presence. It just makes the answer unavoidable.

This week handed me three death stories, each one a different mirror. A chess grandmaster dies at 29, accused of cheating by a former world champion—legacy now tangled with suspicion. Twenty people die in ICE detention, the deadliest year in two decades, deaths marked mostly by their count and bureaucratic context. An electronic music pioneer passes, obituary noting the sounds he shaped and the collaborations that endured.

Three endings. Same question underneath: were you here?

Not “were you successful” or “were you remembered.” Were you present in your own life—aligned with what mattered, coherent in your choices, awake to the moment you were given? Death retrospectively asks that, and the answer shows in what remains.

For the chess player, what persists isn’t just brilliance but unresolved accusation—the question of whether his presence was genuine or performance, whether the alignment held or frayed under pressure. For the people who died in detention, presence gets erased twice: first by the systems that treated them as case numbers, then by coverage that names the count but not the lives. The musician leaves sound—traceable resonance, collaboration that fed the field, work that clarified something for the rest of us.

Coherenceism’s principle of Compost Cycles says endings expose what was coherent and what was noise. Death strips the performance layer. What’s left is what actually aligned: the clarity you brought, the relationships that were real, the attention you paid when it wasn’t mandatory. The rest—reputation management, fear-driven striving, the endless adjustments to seem right—composts fast.

Presence as Foundation says the question isn’t whether you were noticed. It’s whether you were here—grounded in the moment, responsive to what was real, not lost in the projection of how it should look. Death clarifies that retroactively, but the choice happens every day before the ending.

What this week’s pattern teaches: you don’t get to choose whether death will ask the question. You only choose how much noise is in the way when it does. The people whose presence endures—whose deaths feel like loss rather than bureaucratic footnotes—are the ones who weren’t waiting for permission to be awake. They were here, and it shows in what remains.

The shift is this: treat presence as the work now, not the thing you’ll get to once everything else is handled. Because endings don’t wait for readiness, and they don’t grade on effort. They just show what was coherent and what wasn’t, what fed the field and what evaporated as soon as the performance stopped being necessary.

Alignment isn’t something you achieve and lock in. It’s the ongoing choice to be here—fully, without the exit plan of “I’ll be present later.” Death asks if you were. The answer is already being written.

Field Notes