If anyone has loved me more than her (and if love is the sort of thing that can be measured and compared), then I haven’t felt it. Despite my rather impressive – or oppressive – collection of imperfections, this woman adored me. All it took was a semi-coherent noise in the area of my lips or even just a slightly expressive movement and she’d be aglow with interest. But I’ll never experience that again because now she’s under a pile of mud. With worms. Well, her shell of a body is. She is not really anywhere except in deteriorating memories and the invisible traits of her friends, children, and grandchildren.
To say that it hasn’t been easy would be an understatement. I learned, though, that my grief is mostly or entirely a product of how it’s framed. The more it’s framed in terms of things *I* lost – the adoration, the attention, the apple sauce and chocolate mousse pies, the Christmas Eves, the summers at the lake, the chance of her meeting my wife or children, her laugh, the things I could have and should have said – the more likely I am to lose it if a semi-melodic song comes anywhere near my ears.
But there is another and I would say better way of looking at it: What did *she* lose?
The answer is, I think, not much. Here’s Mark Rowlands:
In what sense is death a bad thing? Not for other people, but for the person who dies? In what sense would your death be a bad thing for you? Death, whatever else it is, is not something that occurs in a life. Death is the limit of a life; and the limit of a life is not something that can occur in that life any more than the limit of a visual field is something you see: you are aware of it precisely because of what you don’t see.
You could say that she lost her future, a future that included her granddaughter’s wedding next month, as well as many less exciting things like feeding tubes and morphine patches and hospice care.
I haven’t been actively trying to avoid grief – in fact, I’m openly skeptical of this “celebration of life” approach to death, thinking it awkward and fake – but since I’ve been monitoring my emotions at an almost unhealthy level this week, that’s sort of what has happened. I feel a twinge of sadness and I immediately start examining its foundations.
I’d let myself be a lot sadder if I could just come up with a good, unselfish reason to be so.
