Elijah's name appears only in the title. Inside the poem he is just "he," and the opening, "Since he died," states the death with no softening and no euphemism. Everything after that is the speaker trying to describe what a death has done to them. The central idea is that grief is not one clean feeling. Here it arrives as emptiness, then fear, then sadness, and finally as a performance of being okay.
The key image is the "pit inside." It is a small word with several possible meanings: a hole, the pit of the stomach, the hard stone at the centre of a fruit. All of them suggest a hollow or a heaviness in the body. What makes the image memorable is that the speaker doesn't understand it: "I'm not sure why it's there / Or if its friendly." Asking whether a feeling is friendly turns the pit into something almost alive, like an animal that has moved in uninvited. The speaker can't tell whether it is a threat or just part of missing someone. That uncertainty is more honest than any confident statement about "healing" could be.
The pit seems to change how the speaker sees the world: "everything seems more scary." The simple, almost childlike word "scary" fits, and the voice reads as unpolished and direct. The next line, "I'm scared," is the shortest in the poem, and the shift from "scary" to "scared" matters. First the fear belongs to the world, then it is admitted to be the speaker's own. The line works like a confession that slips out before the speaker can stop it.
The poem has no stanza breaks and no regular metre, and its lines run long and short with no fixed pattern. It sounds like someone thinking aloud, which suits a mind that hasn't settled. The sound patterns are subtle but deliberate-seeming. "Died" and "inside" rhyme in the first two lines, and the same long *i* sound comes back in the final word, "fine." That gives the poem a loose ring shape. Judging by the sound, the "fine" that closes the poem is pulled back toward the "inside" where the pit sits, so the word is undercut by the very sound it shares. "There" and "scary" also share a vowel, and "scary," "scared" and "sad" form a small cluster of hissing *s* sounds that keeps the anxiety close to the surface.
Another pattern is the repeated "I'm": "I'm not sure," "I'm scared," "I'm sad," "I'm fine." Each time the speaker defines themselves, and the last definition is the only false one. The poem ends: "I'm sad but he wouldn't want me to be / So I act like I'm fine." The word "act" is the sharpest in the poem because it admits that "fine" is a role. The reasoning is also tender and a little heartbreaking. The speaker hides the sadness because of what Elijah would want, so even the cover-up is a kind of loyalty. Yet the logic traps them. Their love for him is the reason they can't show how much it hurts. The little word "So" shows how neatly the speaker has talked themselves into silence.
The poem is moving partly because of what it leaves out. We are never told who Elijah was to the speaker or how he died, and there is no consoling image of heaven, memory or time healing. We get only the aftermath, the fear and the pretending. Because the details are missing, almost anyone who has lost someone can fit their own experience into the gaps.
That is where its significance lies. Many poems about death reach for grand language, while this one stays with the small, awkward, unfinished feelings that people tend to hide. It suggests that "I'm fine" can be the most telling thing a grieving person says. It also makes a quiet request of its reader to look past that answer and ask whether the pit is friendly or not.