Now that I’m 47, I’ve been pondering extra typically about loss of life. The truth that it really occurs. To everybody. It’s such a wild factor that we don’t typically speak instantly about (even on this website, the place we speak about every little thing, it’s been two years since, and 5 years earlier than that). And what occurs after we die? Nobody is aware of, after all, however do you’ve concepts/guesses/beliefs?
Earlier than falling asleep at evening, I generally understand, in a profound method, how everlasting loss of life is — it takes a second for it to sink in after which BANG! — and I’ll all of the sudden panic and want to speak about fruit salad. Or hyperfocus on necklaces to determine which kinds I like finest. Or ponder whether or not yogurt or applesauce make the higher substitute should you don’t have sufficient eggs whereas baking.
Fill in any variety of on a regular basis distractions to maintain from realizing that loss of life, as my beloved dad says, “occurs to the very best of us.”
Do you do the identical? Years in the past, I requested what hobbies folks had, and a reader answered, “existential dread.” On the time, it made me snigger, however now I very a lot relate.
***
When my buddy died this summer season, he did depart us, however he’s additionally so current in my thoughts, and naturally in his youngsters’s minds, that he nonetheless generally appears with us within the room, sporting his beanie and suggesting all of us go to the diner. I do know he’s gone, however he’s so alive in our ideas — make it make sense? This sensation jogged my memory of the late poet Andrea Gibson’s love letter to their spouse: “My love, I used to be so flawed. Dying is the alternative of leaving. After I left my physique, I didn’t go away. That portal of sunshine was not a portal to elsewhere, however a portal to right here. I’m extra right here than I ever was earlier than. I’m extra with you than I ever may have imagined. So shut you look previous me when questioning the place I’m. It’s okay. I do know that to be human is to be farsighted. However really feel me now, strolling the chambers of your coronary heart, urgent my palms to the tender partitions of your residing. Why did nobody inform us that to die is to be reincarnated in these we love whereas they’re nonetheless alive? Ask me the altitude of heaven, and I’ll reply, ‘How tall are you?’”
So, is poetry how we come to phrases with grief, with loss, with concern of loss of life? Is loving our kids and mates a form of answer? Or ought to I simply think about that complete yogurt vs. applesauce scenario?
***
If the reply is poetry, then I provide you with Gone From My Sight by Henry van Dyke:
I’m standing upon the seashore. A ship, at my aspect,
spreads her white sails to the transferring breeze and begins
for the blue ocean. She is an object of magnificence and energy.
I stand and watch her till, at size, she hangs like a speck
of white cloud simply the place the ocean and sky come to mingle with one another.
Then, somebody at my aspect says, “There, she is gone.”
Gone the place?
Gone from my sight. That’s all. She is simply as massive in mast,
hull and spar as she was when she left my aspect.
And, she is simply as in a position to bear her load of residing freight to her destined port.
Her diminished dimension is in me — not in her.
And, simply for the time being when somebody says, “There, she is gone,”
there are different eyes watching her coming, and different voices
able to take up the glad shout, “Right here she comes!”
And that’s dying…
How calming and exquisite is that? It jogs my memory of my grandmother.
Lastly, Freddie as soon as teared up telling me that, if he dies first, to think about this stanza from Walt Whitman’s Track of Myself:
I bequeath myself to the filth to develop from the grass I like,
If you’d like me once more search for me below your boot-soles.
You’ll hardly know who I’m or what I imply,
However I shall be good well being to you however,
And filter and fibre your blood.
Failing to fetch me at first maintain inspired,
Lacking me one place search one other,
I cease someplace ready for you.
My beating coronary heart.
Now, please inform me, how do you concentrate on loss of life? What do you assume occurs afterward, if something? How do you distract your self from this basic reality, or, as an alternative, flip towards it? I’d actually love to listen to.
P.S. Extra on loss, together with the Useless Dad Membership and easy methods to speak to children about loss of life. And every little thing you do is nice.
