Death

I've been reminded of death and grief lately. So I turn to the past and to my own experience to share what hopefully makes you feel seen and gives hope in the midst of despair.

The months slip away from you. You don’t want to let them go. Yet you want to hold onto them so tightly they’ll break in your hand and be left stranded. Other times you wish they’d run so fast that it’s years later in an instant. Sometimes it feels later and sometimes it’s yesterday.

The hustle and bustle of the first is now over. All the arrangements and the condolences and the music and the pictures and the relatives and the paperwork and the money is done. Now it’s just quiet and empty and not the same as it used to be. Sometimes it may feel like it’s the same…but it’s not. Something will always remind you that it’s not.

You know that it won’t always be like this. Life isn’t stagnant, even when death permeates it. But you feel stagnant, feel frozen, feel like everything is a frenzied mess and yet you’re stuck in one place, unable to move on, let go, get past it. Whatever else anyone says you should do. What do you do? What is there to do? You just continue…you just “live.” You just are and just will be and even when grief overwhelms you, you feel numb. Even when you forget, you always have to remember. Even when there is life and joy and all the things created for you, there’s always a point when it comes back to the nothingness and the void of what once was.

We can’t change, even when we finally accept it. There has to come that point. Everyone says it does come. But it definitely doesn’t come the three weeks later when the casserole dishes are finally gone and the flowers have all died and you’re back at work because that’s all the time you have. There’s no way a week could make up for losing a lifetime anyway.

And if you don’t look a certain way or act a certain way or refuse to keep going or not keep going or act like nothing happened or act like it was nothing what did happen…you’re wrong, you’re not doing it right, you’re not grieving properly, you’re grieving too much, you’re bringing the rest of the world down. And what’s right, anyway? How can there be a right way to come to terms with the loss of life-of a very part of yourself and your world?

Tragedy upon tragedy comes crashing down on your head and you’re supposed to stand with your head tall and shoulders back? What then? Crumble and fall or march through life with a brittle smile and a carefree laugh designed to be the façade against the white world of pain and blackness inside? Too many questions and too many answers and no answers at all and who wants to ask questions anyway?

Anyway…so then, probably, on and on. What’s the point? A simple enough question with a myriad of responses possible. And you don’t want to hear the answer. You don’t want them to feel the same as you do. Cause if they do, then how come they can say those things and look that way? How could they know what to do? How come you can’t be like them? How come they can’t be like you? Why aren’t they feeling the way they should be feeling? Because obviously they should be feeling like you, or feeling like something or acting like a decent human being or just shutting the hell up because you don’t want to talk about it anymore. Maybe it’s their tragedy, too, but they don’t have to act like it’s their personal property, like they have dibs on suffering. They don’t have to act like it didn’t happen. They don’t have to act like it doesn’t matter, that you don’t matter, or that it matters so much that you don’t matter.

They are too many ways for it all to be so horrible and which would you choose if given the option? You can’t choose and you’re too tired to try. Couldn’t someone just do something? Please? Oh, God…please.

And then it is years later, decades later, and nothing’s changed, but everything’s changed. Time did matter, did make a difference. But there are always little moments when the frozen grief comes back and you’re swept back to that horrible nothingness. But it’s less maybe. If you let it be. And there is hope, always hope. Because time and people and life did keep going despite your stagnancy. It’s no comfort, but hold on to time and know the tears might be healing eventually and life outweighs death if only because our Creator chooses life for us and not death.