I guess my stoicism toward death is being passed onto my kids, who have regularly hung out at the cemetery my grandparents are buried at. During the first few months of the pandemic when we couldn’t see anyone, it was one of the few places I felt safe bringing them to get outside, plus everyone else there was already practicing the 6-feet-apart rule 😉
CW: Death, Grieving
I don’t know if this is the correct way to phrase it, but I oddly enjoy talking about death.
I think death is one of the deepest conversation topics you could talk with someone about. Everyone has a different take on it and reaction to it.
The first death I remember was that of was my great-grandmother who was 98. I was 4 years old and remember my mom telling me she died and it meant her body was no longer alive and she wasn’t with us anymore. I think I cried because I would miss her, but I also remember hearing, “death is a part of life” and it just made sense to me from then on.
I remember having a pretty stoic approach to death for most of my life. I cry and grieve, but I’m oddly very methodical about knowing it comes in waves, and I fully anticipate the stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) to hit whenever they feel like it.
When my friend died back in March, I had a week where when I’d start to think about her death, a flood of emotions would rise from my chest into my throat and before I knew it, I was sobbing and ugly crying. At the same time, I would be telling my husband who was rushing to comfort me that I was fine and I just needed to let it all out. I almost wanted people to treat my crying as if it were a sneeze that I couldn’t control and to disregard it as anything else.
Death is a part of life,” I reminded myself. That thought alone wasn’t a toxic-positivity Band-Aid (like, “everything happens for a reason”), but more like a way to neutralize it and maybe even aid in my own radical acceptance. Once that death is accepted, though, there’s still the matter of how to deal with the grief that comes with it.
I love following my friend Tawny who is in the beginning stages of building a non-profit called Death is Hilarious dedicated to grieving widows and widowers in their 20s and 30s. She has turned her grief into a creative and humorous outlet that so many others have found comfort and support they’ve needed in a time when the one person in their life they imagined spending the rest of their days with is gone. As she went through her own grieving process, she turned the situation into comfort-comedy for others going through the same hell.
And while I wasn’t necessarily the audience because I wasn’t a widow myself, I liked seeing death from Tawny’s very straightforward and clever perspective. It made death more approachable of a topic. This was also right before the full brunt of the pandemic hit the U.S. and all of a sudden, many of us had to find a way to come to terms with our fears of death and the death of loved ones.
After googling “church for agnostics” a few weeks ago, I’ve started going to a Unitarian Universalist chuch to check it out for a few weeks. I’ll probably post soon about the experience, but one thing to know about this particular church is it’s lay-led, meaning each week a different member of the congregation or a member of the community usually presents a themed talk.
This week a member came up and talked about the death of her husband and how she’s been dealing with grief for the last year. When she started her talk, she apologized in advance for the inevitable crying she would do while talking about her late husband. She quickly laughed at herself and followed up with, “but I’m learning not to apologize for crying, since that’s just as much a part of life as death.”
I smiled under my mask and thought about how it seemed like a good amendment to the original phrase I had always held: “Death is a part of life … and so is taking the time to grieve in the way that works for YOU.”
I grieved a few friends this last year and sometimes I wonder what all that time would have looked like if I didn’t spend so much time grieving. That’s probably part of the problem living in a capitalist/hustle-type society — even if we never say it out loud, there’s a nagging voice in some of our heads saying, “there’s gotta be a way I can grieve WHILE BEING AS PRODUCTIVE AS POSSIBLE!”
I still finding myself having to shut down the inner voice that laments all the tasks and emails that fell through the cracks during those periods and instead offer grace to myself. I think for the hundreds of thousands of years humans have been on this planet, we still haven’t figured out how to get over losing someone. Just like every remedy, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.
But I think it helps having spaces to talk about death openly and freely help everyone come to find their preferred comfort.
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