Glimpsing the past
“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”
[Phillipe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death]
I feel the weight of always being the one to bring down the tone of the conversation, the one always wanting to talk about death, about my dead sister, about grief and my experience if it. I can feel some people recoiling at such an utterance. Do they think it has been too long? Or that I should be wearing my badge of honour for 'soldiering on', for suffering in silence as if this affords me a level of respect for my strength of character? Is it strong to suffer in silence? Or is it stronger to face my pain, acknowledge the devastation it has brought and the changes it has kindled inside me? Changes that can never be undone. Who I was before I am no longer. I am at peace with this, but are others?
I am so grateful to those who are, who accept me for who I am now, who welcome the changed me, who welcome my changing moods and comfort me with open arms. They are my salvation. They reassure me that I am not broken, merely changed and that I am loveable and loved just as I am. Those that struggle with me as I am now, those that seek to reassure me in their misguided way that I am who I have always been, that I will somehow 'move on' from the pain of losing my sister, push me away. I love them of course. They love me and they are trying to comfort me. I am not blind to that. But they isolate themselves from me. They fail to see me as I am now. They fail to see what I need. How could they if they have not experienced such loss? And when our society teaches us that grief is to be endured silently, that our pain is private and the fall of tears is best kept behind closed doors?
"People in grief think a great deal about self-pity. We worry about it, dread it, scourge our thinking for signs of it. We fear that our actions will reveal the condition tellingly described as "dwelling on it". We understand the aversion most of us have to "dwelling on it". Visible mourning reminds us of death, which is construed as unnatural, failure to manage the situation."
[Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking]
Unlike in years gone by when death often occurred at home, when people were cared for by family in their beds as they succumbed to some fatal malady, now death is in the domain of hospitals, hospices and homes for the elderly. No more are we exposed to the realities and exigencies of someone's passing. We are not equipped to cope with the effects, physiological, emotional or cognitive. We do not understand the exhaustion and sloth that accompanies grief. How opening an email or paying a bill seems like too arduous a task. Or it is simply a pointless one? How the value of mundanity seems nought.
There is nothing that your absence does not touch, no experience where your death goes unnoticed, no moment where I forget you. Your absence is omnipresent, and the only time I have respite from the pain is when I consciously block it out. Something at which I have become disconcerting adept. I am unsure of the long term benefit of this, but in the short term it affords me much needed relief, albeit momentary.
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
[C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed]
