The living

Disclaimer

The world has seen a lot of writing about death. It is, after all, the most universal theme imaginable. Writers (who generally ply their trade as a kind of therapy) are especially likely to write about death. And, once something is written, the writer’s temptation to share it (even if it was only written for personal reflection) can be too strong to resist. So we have entire sections of bookstores on death and grieving. And (seeing as I don’t have a publisher willing to indulge my every written whim) we now have this blog entry.

Subject

Two of the books I’m reading now are about death. This was not necessarily intentional, but neither is it wholly a coincidence – death has been on my mind more than usual lately.

Maybe it’s because my grandmother has been sick. Last year she had a stroke and now she has breast cancer. This is my maternal grandmother who has always been (as grandmothers go) youthful, independent, and intelligent and eloquent beyond all reason. For years, even decades, I have been preparing myself for the death of my paternal grandparents. They are older and have been in generally poor health for a very long time. They live in Nebraska and have scads of other grandchildren and frankly have never been a part of my life in the major way my grandma Lucore has been. And, sad to say, I always expected my Dad’s parents would go first. I haven’t seen them for almost four years but I still have the mental picture of the last time I saw them – a habit I got into many years ago when visiting them, because I was aware the opportunities might be few. But now my Mom’s mom is showing startling and terrible signs of her mortality and it hurts like being hit in the stomach.

Also, a few weeks ago, apropos of nothing so far as I know, Diana asked me about death and dying and the extent to which I have known people who died and what it’s like. Maybe it was because of that I have been keenly aware this month that it’s now been five years since my friend Gwen died. Five years ago this month. And I’m sure it would have been on my mind anyway, but Diana’s question put me in a particularly philosophical mood about it all.

Anyway, this obscenely long post is not really a book review, though it kind of is – it’s mostly some thoughts about a not-especially-blog-friendly subject: death. Or, more specifically, living after those we love have died.

Background

I have known a few people who have died. Many older relatives of some degree of removal. I’ve been to lots of funerals that were really nothing more than formalities. But I have been to two significant funerals in my life, and missed one other that would have been the most significant of all.

I remember my great grandfather, but I can recall nothing of his death. He and my great grandmother lived in New Mexico and I suppose the greatest impact his death had on me was that it meant my great grandmother moved to Pueblo to be near my grandmother and so I saw her much more. She died when I was five or six. It was a Saturday morning and I was watching cartoons. My parents were still asleep. The phone rang but one of my parents (probably my Dad) answered it before I got to the kitchen. I went back into the living room, watching TV. Then my parents called me into their bedroom and told me great grandma had died. I don’t know that I really understood but I was very aware of how sad my mother looked about it and so I was sad, too. I went back into the living room and a McDonald’s ad was playing. This was when I began to hate clowns and their fake, painted-on smiles, and especially Ronald McDonald. I dressed up and we went to Pueblo for the funeral, during which I fell asleep. On the way back home I started to understand what it means to be dead – we never went to Pueblo without seeing my great grandma, but we had just been and I hadn’t gotten to see her and from what everyone was telling me I never would get to again.

When I was a freshman in college, I was in a long-distance relationship with a girl who still lived in Denver. Her sister had died very suddenly from leukemia a few years earlier and the loss had absolutely wrecked her family. One morning in December, a few hours before I was supposed to take a math final, my girlfriend called and woke me up. She was crying. It had happened before and from the very first moment I tried to soothe her and tell her it would be OK. But she told me that I was wrong, it was not OK. She told me her mother had killed herself in the night. I think I may have flunked the final. Just a few days later I was back in Denver for winter break. It was one of the coldest weekends I can remember in Denver. The first time my parents met any member of my girlfriend’s family was in the receiving line after the funeral. A Christian service for a woman who has committed suicide is awkward enough but toward the end a piece of music was played. Toccatta, maybe? Several rows in front of where I sat with my parents and for no immediately discernible reason, my girlfriend stood during the playing of the song. Everyone else remained seated. When, later, I asked her why, even she seemed not to know. “It seemed like the thing to do,” she said. I think it was defiant, a final fuck-you to her mother, who took the pills just after an argument with my girlfriend. Death, I learned, does not always bring on grief.

And then there’s Gwen, who was my best friend sometimes and sometimes almost like a girlfriend and sometimes someone who broke my heart and who I hated. And I don’t talk about her much because it’s awkward and because I think if I were Diana I might not want to hear about it all the time. But Gwen, who died five years ago this month in a car accident that was her own stupid fault, is ultimately the only real experience I have with loss and grieving. She lived in New York when she died and I was in Tucson and didn’t even find out for days that she was gone. I didn’t go back to New York for the service and I don’t know what her mother did with the ashes. The closest I got to saying goodbye was a small gathering I had with four other people who had known her in Tucson. We lit some candles and we talked about her and we cried a lot and that night it seemed like maybe it was some kind of closure but the next morning I woke up and nothing was different.

Losing Gwen, for me, was fundamentally different than most significant deaths because she was not physically close to me at the time and hadn’t been for a couple of years. We were still very close as friends, but I was accustomed to not seeing her, I was used to the feeling of thinking of her and wishing she was around. It’s the way I feel today about Tony in Chicago. Except that if I see something that makes me want to talk to Tony I can call him and I used to call Gwen for the same random reasons – and now I can’t. Gwen’s death is not a constant hole in my life because for two years before she died she wasn’t constantly there. I had already, with the benefit of a few thousand miles, conquered what I imagine to be the most difficult part of the death of a loved one – the lack of their physical presence. Which is not to say that her death was not devastating to me, for it was. But what I do mean is that I have been surprised while reading Joan Didion’s startling memoir about the death of her husband to find how similar my grief was, how similar it is.

The Books

Joan Didion’s husband died, very suddenly, at the end of 2003. That event and the experiences of the year that followed, form the basis for her newest book, a memoir called “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

The other book is fiction, an almost sci-fi novel by Kevin Brockmeier, called “The Brief History of the Dead.” The book takes very literally an idea common to many African and some eastern cultures that there are not two states of being (alive and dead), as we generally believe in the West, but three: living, the recently deceased who are still “alive” in the memories of the living, and the forgotten dead. “Brief History” takes place partly in a city inhabited by that middle category, those who exist only in the imaginations of those still living. They come to the city when they die, and survive there only until all the people who remembered them are still living – then they vanish. The book takes this concept much farther with a global plague and other adventures, but it’s the philosophy that everyone (me included) wants to talk about, not the plot.

Just thinking with my fingers

I like the idea of that middle state of existence. It fits with my ultimate belief that there is no afterlife and that we are nothing more than what we leave behind. And it seems kind of true, as well: Gwen isn’t really gone for me. I still think of her. I know others who do. Two years ago I bizarrely ran into Gwen’s freshman year roommate at Coit Tower in San Francisco and we spent just a few hours together and we didn’t talk about much except Gwen. So long as she lives in my memory, then, she’s not really, completely gone. Is she? I don’t now remember much about my great grandmother but I do always think of the way she would touch the top of my head. That might not affect me as much as memories of Gwen (or my ex-girlfriend’s mother) do, but they’re still real memories, strong, clear.

My problem comes from one of the only other books I have read about dying and grief, which I read after Gwen died because when someone you know dies you will inevitably be given a copy of this book (maybe by me), called “A Grief Observed” by CS Lewis about the death of his first wife. He wrote:

“Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes – like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night – little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape will be quite hidden in the end.”

This is true of all memory – we remember what we want to remember – but is especially true and worth remembering when thinking about the dead. After all, I don’t fully know anyone, even my wife – I have but impressions and selections of her. I have only what she chooses to show me and the way I interpret that. The thing is that while she’s living my idea of her continually grows, every interaction with a person you know challenges your idea of them, offers a chance for you to re-write the file that the computer of your brain has labeled with their name. But if that person should die, they no longer have the chance to challenge you and your own vision can become the reality – you can choose the details that best fit your needs and forget the rest. Most of us forget the bad times – the dead are more often than not angels in our memory, no matter how much they may have hurt us when living. Then again, at least in the short term aftermath of her mother’s death, my ex-girlfriend remembered none of the good things about her mother – only remembering the fights made it possible to hate her.

And I tend to feel that if I die the part of me that lives on in the memories of those I have known will not truly be me. Pieces of me, maybe. Fragments. But not me. I haven’t read far enough into “Brief History” to yet know if this identity problem is an issue in the world of the dead, but it seems a bit much for such a slim book to take on.

What I’ve marveled at from the initial chapters of Didion’s memoir is the way our brain never fully comprehends the notion of death. It is very literally unimaginable. We have many theories of what being dead is, but we cannot know. So, when someone close to us dies, it never fully makes sense.

I have always assumed, to the limited extent that I think about death, that it’s the physical part that drives home the reality. Maybe this is because the way I miss Gwen – as I described before – is not physical, but emotional. I had already adjusted to the physical distance before she actually died. My assumption, then, has generally been that if someone who is literally physically close to you dies that the reality of it is much more immediate. Clearly, it will make the loss of that person worse in the short term. But my guess was that, in the long run, the physical withdrawal would also result in a better mental conception of the reality of the person’s absence. Didion’s memoir tells me that this is not so. Even in the midst of her struggle – and it is of course a horrible struggle – to adjust to the physical loss of her husband, what she finds harder is to accept, to mentally conceive, of his death. I sometimes catch myself thinking I should call Gwen, or that it’s been a while since she called me – Didion, similarly, keeps expecting her husband to walk through the front door. She won’t get rid of his clothes or his shoes – she assumes he will need them as soon as he is back.

It’s a beautiful book, marvelous in its awful, dark honesty. Highly recommended.