It strikes me that we rarely speak of death. Most of our conversations on the subject of death, rightly so, seem to be about what it is to live – to lose, to survive, to miss, to reconcile, to depart. We want to know what it is we will feel when that which we love is no longer available to us in the ways to which we are accustomed, to know what it will mean for those we’ve grown to serve or protect, to use the sad inevitable to teach us something about how to live before we’ve died. We tell ourselves stories to convince ourselves it isn’t really happening and that the self that we’ve come to believe in, that strange pilot that lives right behind our eyes, or the pilots we feel through empathy and mirrors must live behind the eyes of those that we love, will upgrade its ship and sail by God or be reborn again in a new human body, unassailable by finality.
I can’t argue with continuance, and will argue for it in the second part, but I do argue that in our prevailing narratives of souls and pilots, of mourning and grief, and of the often-feared counter imposed on non-believers or shuddered at by former believers done with being controlled by organized faith – that after death, sans heaven and God, there’s eternal Nothingness – we do ourselves a disservice. As with anything world-shattering and elusive of tidy explanation, we’re prone to avert our eyes. In so doing, we often miss the sublime. Continuance and finality aren’t mutually exclusive. The magic of Death lives in that.
I get it, though. My brothers and I are prone, especially at funerals but randomly as well, to count the dead, at least until it’s too sad to do so. At Ricky’s funeral, we stopped at “wait…I think we’ve already passed how many of us are still alive…” and had many more to count. Nothing about death feels magical or even interesting in the back of a sad pickup truck.
Missing, what it is to miss and not be able to seek, or whether we will be missed, or how all this longing and aching will impact our, or their, ability to keep walking through the day-to-day is top of mind for good reason. What else is a social beast to do but wonder what could be without something so integral as their society? If you die or I die, I lose my society either way. I can no longer be served by or serve the one-and-only You. How the hell am I supposed to deal with that? What am I going to or supposed to feel?
I don’t need to prepare for my death, not really, no matter how afraid I am of it, especially if I take the Abrahamic-out. It may help if I can, may help me find it with a smile instead of fear or tears, but no matter my preparation, it turns out the same.
I do need to prepare for a life without you, or prepare you for your life without me. There are things to be done. Steps to be walked.
I plan to talk about Death. What it isn’t and what it is, with all the logical proof I can muster. I’d be an asshole to launch into that without addressing the twin, top of mind elephant in the room, though. If you’ve need to worry about how you’re going to feel at the death of someone you love, I’ve ample experience and am going to tell. I’m actively, daily, learning how to deal with it too, so I’m going to tell you that. If you’re set to endure this nightmare (it’s no surprise most of our collective nightmares revolve around the subject), you’re likely to get lots of “maybes” and “I really can’t says” from folks that don’t want to be too committal or prescriptive on the subject, or who wisely realize that it’s somewhat specific to you as an individual.
I’m not going to give you a maybe though. I’m going to tell you exactly what you will feel in frank terms.
You aren’t going to like it.
I want to talk about Death, so let’s get all this living bullshit out of the way.
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There are lists all over, from various research groups, therapeutic initiatives, sociology and anthropology conglomerates throughout different time periods of “universal emotions.” You’ll see lists cited in pop culture ranging from 5 to 30 emotions. Sometimes, they’re tailored for the condition you are enduring – in PTSD therapies I’ve seen a greater number of what we deem to be negative emotions on lists than positives, sometimes teasing out nuances between things like Guilt and Shame so they get their own pages; in yogic self-help websites focused on eating, living, loving, you may see Passion and Love or Fear and Surprise split out from one another. This is tangential to what we need to discuss, but relevant.
There are lists of emotions that are universal — here meaning observable in enough of the species that we can reasonably say a large most of us feel them, and leaving the room for subcultural or regional variance and the non-universal, like Liget. Find a list of them that make sense to you and learn the spectrum of co-related, nuanced emotions that nest under their umbrella (ex. Frustration lives under Anger but so does Rage.) Notice as you look through lists of universal emotions that some repeat themselves with greater frequency enough that you get suspicious that they may be the truly universal ones (Love, Joy, Sadness, Anger, Guilt, Fear), and notice that they’ve played a strong(er) role in your life, but collect the other ones anyway.
When someone that you love dies, and sometimes when someone you know about but don’t personally love dies, you are going to feel all of these universal emotions.
You’re going to feel them in a cocktail that is indeed tailored, but not just to you and what you are or believe.
It will also be tailored to the following because you are of one or more cultures and tribes (examples in parentheses):
- Timing (infant v. centenarian)
- Mechanism (sudden death from old age in sleep v. long terminal illness v. sudden event)
- Your relationship (child v. mother v. best friend v. lover)
- World events (peace and prosperity v. ongoing war)
- Relativism (perception of chronic suffering v. perception of vim)
That cocktail, however unique and tailored, will contain every universal emotion in some amount that ranges from the imperceptible to the life-controlling.
The cocktail will begin when it begins – you may expect that you’ll break into a sobbing puddle of tears the moment you receive the call, but this is a delusion. You may, in fact, find yourself in those immediate tears, but you may have already cried them, or you may spring into the multitude of works that have to be attended to when someone dies and forget to, or not need to, or need to not, feel your sadness (with whatever cultural and personal observation of it, including tears, known to you) at some later date.
Sadness may not be the emotional cocktail’s beginning. You may find joy and relief at the front of the train, or fear, or shame. You may stall it or hasten it by your choices, your conversations, or what’s in your glass. You can try to control this, but you will not. It may feel a bit random. It’s safe to say, though, that the emotional cocktail will have a beginning, and it will begin when it begins.
Some time after it begins, the cocktail will reach its peak. By peak here, I mean that emotions will be at their greatest number in their most complex mix, at their greatest intensity and volume, and most top of mind relative to your normal, baseline, day-to-day emotions. This peak may be higher or lower than you expect before you get to it. Its duration may be longer or shorter than you’d expect given your own nature or the importance of that relationship to you and your narrative. You may or may not accurately identify that you are in, heading into, or exiting that peak. The contents of the peak will be unique to you, the moment it occurs in the “lifecycle” of your loss, and the moment of your own lifecycle in which it occurs. It’s safe to say, though, that, some time after it begins, perhaps immediately after the beginning but maybe not, the emotions you experience will be at their peak.
After the peak, you will feel every universal emotion for the rest of your life. You’ve been feeling them all along, and, during the peak, you felt them quite acutely, so you’ve lots of experience with what they are like. What will change, though, is that, randomly, sometimes when you expect it and sometimes when you don’t, for intervals of changing intensity, duration, and complexity (less than the peak by definition), you will feel these emotions with the name of the person you lost, and their loss, and their absence, attached.
You will be angry that they’ve left you or that you have to bury the dog without their help. You will look at yourself in the mirror at the age they were when they died and see them and feel gratitude that they helped build you and relief you survived and fear that you soon won’t. You will be having sex with your new person and feel a wave of sadness interrupt your orgasm and disappear as it came, orgasming thereafter. You may or may not feel guilt or shame about either the orgasm or the disappearance of the sadness (guilt at healing is an underdiscussed subject), or you may feel joy and love that your dead partner worked with you to teach you where your orgasm lives.
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Neither I, nor you — and I recognize this is frustrating, — know what emotions you will feel and at what intensity you will feel them, for the rest of your life, nor which ones will have the name of your loved one written on them, nor how inconvenient or uplifting that will be. It’s safe to say, though, that you will feel the universal emotions for the rest of your life and that, after the death of someone you love, they will color and create and participate in those emotions.
This is true of the people in your life that are still alive, too. The living people in your life color and create and participate as you feel every universal emotion, somewhat randomly, day-to-day. That strange fact is one of the reasons we don’t talk about death when we talk about death. We know feeling, we know things, we cannot physically imagine a lack, nothing is a story we tell ourselves because we learn the game of opposites as children and have language, but we can’t imagine it.
We feel on. And so, too, shall you, after your loss. All the feelings, “randomly,” and however long they last.
I’d tell you that this means Death isn’t any more frightening than Life, because I personally believe that’s true, but I don’t want you to hear me say “you have nothing to fear” when I do. I think it will make sense if you are afraid, now or in the future; you’ve a whole lot of emotions to deal with, and you’ve got to be the one to do it. What could be more frightening than that? I think, though, that it would make most sense if you are afraid about that regarding both Life and Death equally.
If anyone tells you “Whatever you feel is ok,” and sounds like a schmuck for it, I remind you that schmucks can be as accurate as proverbial broken clocks or proverbs – at least sometimes. Folks that tell you that you learn to live with grief, not recover from it, are probably right.
How then do you deal with this? I don’t know; I am an expert in losing but not in returning to grace thereafter, not yet.
I can say, though, that I’m certain it looks like learning to observe, identify, accept, and surf your emotions, no matter what name is or isn’t attached to them at the time, and to effectively deliver on positive outcomes for you and your clan despite, or using, whatever emotions you’ve got.
It’s safe to say that how you deal with death is to learn how to live, and then to live.
The Drowned Rat Gospel Choir 