August 11, 2026

When The Old Life Ends

A warrior I have been. Now it is all over. A hard time I have.

Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Lakota leader, sang this song in the years after his people's world had been dismantled—the buffalo herds destroyed, the free-roaming plains life ended by confinement to reservations following his surrender in 1881. It carries the grief of a warrior culture, mourning not one death but the end of an entire way of being that could never be recovered. Sitting Bull himself would be killed within a decade of these reservation years, but the song's sorrow was already complete—it named a loss that had already happened, not one still coming. His words speak today to anyone grieving the end of a chapter of their life, whether it's a career, a relationship, or a version of themselves that no longer exists.