"I Just Saw Him Two Days Ago"

Whenever someone dies, there's always that person who announces to anyone within earshot: "I just saw him two days ago." 

As if their recent proximity to the deceased grants them special significance in the tragedy, as if they were somehow closer to the cosmic event than everyone else.

This strange practice reveals something uncomfortable about how we respond to death, not with grief and reflection, but also with an immediate need to establish our position in the story. 

The moment becomes less about the person who died and more about proving our relevance to their final chapter.

What exactly is this declaration supposed to accomplish? 

Does seeing someone recently make their death more tragic? 

Does temporal proximity to mortality grant special insight or authority? 

The person announcing this seems to believe their recent encounter with the deceased makes them a more important witness to the loss than someone who saw them last week.

It's a peculiar form of grief competition, where people compete to establish who had the most recent contact with the dead person. 

"I just saw him two days ago" implies superiority over someone who might have seen them last month. 

The shorter the timeframe, the more significant the relationship appears, at least in the speaker's mind.

This response exposes our desperate need to make ourselves central to events that have nothing to do with us. 

Someone else's death becomes an opportunity to demonstrate our own importance, our own connection to drama, our own relevance to tragedy. 

Instead of focusing on the loss itself, we immediately start calculating how to position ourselves within the narrative.

But what makes this particularly strange is how irrelevant the information actually is. 

Whether you saw someone two days ago or two months ago has no bearing on the reality of their death or the appropriateness of your grief. Yet people announce these timeframes as if they carry deep significance.

"I just saw him two days ago" ultimately says more about the speaker than about the deceased. It reveals someone who cannot encounter even death without immediately calculating how to make it about themselves. The tragedy becomes their stage, and temporal proximity becomes their ticket to relevance.