On death

My grandfather was signed up for hospice on Friday. It is not a surprise; it was a long time coming. He has been in decline for several years, with the last year being a sharp turn downward. My grandmother has been keeping him at home, determined to allow him to stay independent. I think she would have been much happier the last few years at a transitional living community. For such social creatures, they have become increasingly isolated. She did an abrupt about-face yesterday, letting the family know that they were moving as soon as a space became available.

I am not sad for him. His life has become one constrained by an ailing body. I am not sad for me. I have a lot of really wonderful memories of him. I am sad for my grandmother. They had a long, beautiful life together. They have been together for 72 years and married for over 65. I do ache for her and the ways in which her life is about to be set adrift. She only spent 13 years of her life without him. When someone has been your spouse and partner for that long, what must it be like to suddenly be without them? Your concept of yourself and your life is built in relation to this other person with whom you shared it. Who do you become when the buoy to which you have been anchored nearly your entire life is gone?

I am not struggling with his impending death. There is no tragedy in death at an old age after a life well lived. When we mourn loss through death, we mourn numerous losses, all inextricably entwined. We wonder what our lives will be like without them. How our life might be changed if we had done or said any number of things differently. We mourn the loss of opportunity and the ways in which our lives will never quite be the same. We define ourselves in relation to others in our lives. Without them, our self concept changes, at least a little. You’ve heard it said in movies and books, perhaps even in real life: “I don’t know how to exist in a world in which they don’t.” In death, we cease to be the narrators of our own lives, becoming just characters in the life stories of others. The people we lose become more or less than the flawed human beings that they were. They lose the grey complexities that made them vibrant individuals. They become black or white, villains or heroes; symbols of our own perceived inadequacies and insecurities. The telling of the events of their lives, and their roles in ours, become colored by our own memories, tinted by our emotions and our perception of ourselves. The stores we tell ourselves can cause them to become giants or fade to translucence in our memories; and they are not here to contradict us or give us cause to doubt the roles we are casting them in. Grief is entirely the affair of the living.

I am sad, but through this lens, what I am truly struggling with is the sense of impermanence in my own life. A person can be alive, and then, suddenly not. This life that took up so much space is over. When I got married, I thought it would be forever. My life for the last seven years was molded around the central tenet that my life was tied to C. The dreams, plans, and general understanding of what my life would look like, all grew with that as their bedrock. The concept of it not mattering what you do, but who you do it with, held true. The ending of my marriage may be a type of liberation, but it is also an unmooring from the core of my life that I held as inviolable. I am set adrift. The thing that I held as permanent in my life, is actually not. With that being true, it throws everything else that I held to be self-evident into question. It dissolves the images in my head of what the future might look like, like the rain washing away Burt’s magical chalk pictures on the sidewalk in Mary Poppins. I am scribbling away, sketching out new alternatives, but they seem so ephemeral, smoke wafted this way and that into the vague shape of an image. I am at a loss.