Lately I've been struggling with the idea of death, which always leads me to struggle with how unoriginal and boring my struggles are. People have always struggled with loss! I'm not experiencing anything new and special. I feel like I should be able to call upon the emotional wisdom of my ancestors and just... get over it. People die, Haley! Animals die. Plants die. Everything dies! MOVE ON. You're going to die, even. Sorry to tell ya, bud. I sure hope you're enjoying not being dead and that you stop spending all your time obsessing over death.
Though I've always felt... uneasy about death, my current issue with it is that I've recently lost someone who meant a lot to me. Let me clarify: she died. She isn't lost; I know where she is, which is nowhere. But everywhere, because she was (is?) such an incredible, genuine, kind, wildly smart person who left a deep impression on everyone in her life. The impression she left on me is making it difficult to accept that she is gone. How could she be? How can someone who I loved so much, who I saw nearly every day, be gone from my life? From the world? Unfathomable!
That's not true, though, that I saw her nearly every day. I haven't seen her since The Before Times, in March. When COVID-19 began to look like a real threat to us Floridians, she stopped coming into the office because she was At Risk. Then I stopped coming into the office, and didn't start coming into the office until a couple months ago.
Then she died.
So what I am having difficulty accepting is that someone who has been in my life for many years, who was there even when she wasn't, is very much physically not here anymore. I think not seeing her six months before her death has made it even harder, as I'd grown accustom to simply imagining her in her home, reading or working on her laptop. My brain is telling me she's not dead, she's working at home and is too busy to talk. Is it unhealthy to allow my brain to think that? Or should I force myself to acknowledge that my friend is dead? Should I write it down one hundred times? Would that help? Or is it okay and perfectly healthy to use my imagination as a coping mechanism? Is that the point of heaven? I'm not a religious person so I don't really know. In fact, I've dismissed heaven as a way for religious people to deal with death because they don't want to accept that someone they love has simply stopped existing.
Having never lost a part of my daily life before and having lived most my life as a smug asshole who wanted only to show weakness when it could be used as a tool for manipulation, I thought everyone could and should simply move on, as I said earlier. Believing your beloved to be "in a better place" was a sign of weakness to me, the asshole.
I don't think I've ever seen Proper Grief. When I was seven or eight years old, my mom's younger brother was shot and killed at a party. He was much younger than her, so he would have been 23 or 24. If I'd ever met him I have and had absolutely no recollection of it, and all I remember from his death is that my mom locked herself in the bathroom and that my paternal grandma took us kids to Disney World. I don't know if this trip was planned ahead of time, or if our grandma took us so our mom could grieve in relative peace. I don't know if Mom would have preferred having her kid nearby. Truly, I'm not sure if it actually happened like that because memory--particularly the memory of a child--is unreliable and I'm certainly not going to ask about it. Even if it didn't happen that way, it may as well have because the impression it left on me is this: grief is not to be seen or shared, it is to be locked in the bathroom while everyone around you goes to Disney World.
When that same grandma died in the fall of 2017, the funeral was put on hold due to a hurricane, then my family scheduled it while my dad was to be on a cruise. I think it would have cost money for him to cancel or reschedule the cruise and he was of the mind that the funeral had already been delayed once, so why can't it wait another week? I believe she'd been cremated so there wasn't a body sitting around. We didn't really talk about it. We don't really talk about anything. My sisters and I did not attend the funeral, in solidarity with my father and for the simple fact that no one invited us. I actually only learned the time and location of the event from some pictures an aunt posted on Facebook. I told my dad that once he returned, we'd have a small get together at his house where we'd share our favorite memories of Grandma, but he didn't bring it up and neither did I and it never happened.
As with my friend, since I didn't see Grandma every day it is easy to imagine her at home, sewing a quilt. Is that her heaven? Or, at least, the heaven I've imagined for her, which for my sake is the real heaven?
So my experience in dealing with death is this: Don't.
