This is everything I don’t know about grief
I never knew death before my twenties. I’d never lost anyone before then. I think I started to believe that death as a concept was something stigmatised. My inner realist understands that death is ever approaching the longer we live, with the more risks we take. I guess I had it in my head, a form of acceptance; death is inevitable. I’ve been fortunate in my youth to have held onto every single one of my extended family members, every single one of my close friends.
That all changed this year. In the space of a month I lost three very close people in my life, and another slightly removed. I didn’t expect to ever understand the gravity of death and its impedance on those in close surrounding. I still don’t think I fully do.
In this month that passed, in the weeks of home visits and memorial attendance, I felt completely external to my inner being. As if I was existing in this time of bereavement as a ghost myself. I attended the succession of funerals, wakes, receptions and burials but as a mere physical stature. I truly don’t think I was wholly present during this time.
“Grief is something I simply don’t know. And after this short, condensed, and exhausting period of death after death after death, I am no further to understanding it within myself. ”
With the news of someone passing, I consistently ponder my lack of humanity in that I don’t feel immediately sad. I don’t feel an inner sadness for death. Rather, I receive an overwhelming frantic energy to do something; to make phone calls, to cook food, to buy a plane ticket home. Sadness doesn’t penetrate my inner self. At least not in the immediacy of the moment. Weeks down the track it begins to trickle in.
In times of grief, my inherent tendency is to keep busy. I throw myself into work and study as to limit any possible chance to think of the occasion. I avoid any moment of solitary time. I avoid standing still. I need preoccupation; I need to be busy, and I thrive when I’m doing something of use.
You see, I don’t enjoy dwelling. When I visit the loved ones close to those who’ve passed, I instinctively avoid the topic of their death and the dejection that surrounds it. I throw out a smile and bellow out a loud ‘g’day’ as I help myself through their front door. I don’t dance around the topic but I make light of the situation. I swindle any dismal conversation back to cheeky giggle and light-heartedness. I suppose this is somewhat to do with the way we as a Western society have dislocated ourselves from the topic of death. It frightens us in a way. It makes us uncomfortable.
“My observations of grievance in others is something so far removed from my own inner dialogue of death. I’m perplexed as to how I’m supposed to feel, and the stark contrast to that of how I actually feel. I sit in the churches and town halls, watching the mass of hysterics unfold among those who, in my view, aren’t within the proximity for such lamentation, and I question if I’m the one out of place.”
In the three funerals I’ve attended this year, I have not shed a single tear. I sit in the silence and in admiration to those who persist their way through a eulogy speech, those bearing flowers to the grave and the families who sit in a dark aura of sorrow. I despise the nature of these events. I find it disturbing to witness a family of loved ones grieve the death itself, then be thrust onto a public stage, forced into conversations overflowed with sympathy, making causalities with certain attendees they may very well have not known for recent years.
I’m more conscious of this aspect of death and grieving than anything else. When I returned home from the most recent funeral, one for the father of my childhood best friend, I felt an overwhelming frustration. I recognise that for many, rituals are a means of comfort, a means of closure. I personally don’t appreciate the rituals of death. I think they’re outgrown. I stood and watched my best friend suffer through a cruel and unwelcomed lutto succession, the panicked look on her face as each new stranger approached with commiseration reflected in their eyes.
I wanted so badly to get out of there, to get her out of there. I think there’s an evident stereotype that is hard to avoid when it comes to funerals, that is that they are, or they need to be, intrinsically sad. That the people who attend can’t just be happy, that they can’t celebrate the life that was in a way that elicits a sense of joy. If I were to ponder deep into my internal psyche, this very desire to modify the nature of these occasions may just be a nebulous precaution to death itself. Perhaps I am so afraid of death and loss that I sweep it under the rug when it does surface in my life on rare occasions.
“I often discount the fact that people are sewn into the lining of our lives. In varying ways, they each have their hold. A permanent grasp. And this permanency is not erased by the sudden conclusion of their physical existence.”
Perhaps in my cogitation to navigate grief within myself, I am to first understand the gravity of influence the people in my life possess within the hollow chambers of my soul. If there is a soul there at all.
Because I do care; I care so deeply. Especially for the people I love most. And I do mourn the death of those who pass. But I mourn in a way that’s perhaps unconventional. Or perhaps I’m simply trapped in the cyclone that is the first stage of grief: denial.
Grief is a cruel kind of learning, but it is learning nonetheless. It’s not something that comes naturally to me. It’s not something I’m open to welcoming in. Ask me again in a year and my knowledge of grief may be overwhelming. At this moment, I’m one death away from giving in to the exhaustion of bereavement and allowing myself to just disappear and “grieve” for three months straight. Maybe then I’ll take grief in its stride, turbulent as it may be.
Words — Sarah Noonan
Image — via Arch McLeish
