Compared to the vast majority of people in my life and in the world, I have very little experience with death as something immediately affecting my life. Yes, I’ve had grandparents and pets die, and yes, I’ve had deaths hit loved ones or friends hard, but for a 28 year old who’s lived through a pandemic, I’ve avoided tragedy extremely well. When you have distance to a heavy concept like this, you develop two things:
One – an ungrounded, romantic view of how you’d respond to it. For me, I have this completely ludicrous fantasy that if someone I’m close with dies suddenly that I’ll snap into a hyper-productive streak in their honor. It reads like a cliché Hollywood screenplay: someone dies and I’m suddenly locked up in my room, cranking out art. I don’t even know WHAT art. That’s how little I’ve thought this through. But because I’ve been fortunate not to have experienced this tragic death I get to lie to myself. I get to pretend I’d be Dave Grohl pumping out his debut album in a week in the wake of Kurt Cobain’s death, or Clapton writing Tears in Heaven in a frenzied mourning.
The more likely reality is that the effect is debilitating. Watching a close friend of mine try to reconcile her friends suicide is the exact opposite of mental productivity. If anything, that kind of event renders output feeling meaningless, being able to do things is something you have to work towards. Still, everyone handles these events differently, and I don’t know how I’d handle it until it happens to me in a serious way.
Speaking of:
Two – An anticipation that it will happen to you. Given the size of my current friend and family circles, it almost feels inevitable that someone close to me will have a tragedy happen to them. As a torturous exercise my brain fires off a “How would it be if something were to happen to X person?” question that produces a productive terror. Productive because it forces you to value that person more in the present, at least in theory.
Then of course the thought arises: What if it’s me?
It would make sense. I have been cartoonishly lucky in my life thus far and at some point that will swing the other way. When considering the audience for this blog, I wonder if I’ll be someone reading it after I’ve died. Some self-tortuous way of mourning. If that’s you, I’m glad you’re here, but I do question if you’ll feel better upon reading this. It’s very meta isn’t it? I’d prefer I be the one infused by tragedy rather than loved ones. I’ll be fine, dead or alive. I would just hope that the cause of my death wouldn’t overshadow my life itself. Sometimes you see someone who died and you can’t get past those words ‘SUICIDE’ or “CAR CRASH” or “CANCER” ect.
As of today, I’m thankful for this ignorance, and for experiencing death as a concept more than an immediate consideration in my life. But this ignorance doesn’t mean I think any response to a death is A-OK. I have a strict barometer of what I consider to be spiritual bullshit. Whenever someone tries to mysticize something, they immediately lose credibility in my eyes because they’re making things more complex by doing that. They’re actually making it harder for the listener to really process the facts of the situation. You see this kind of thinking everywhere, look up “manifesting” “spiritually”, or god forbid “indigo children” on social media spiritualizing normal phenomena (or just making shit up.)
When it comes to death, my family is somewhat guilty of this as well. When my grandma died my parents said something in the nature of “when the wind blows you’ll know that’s her.” Beautiful thought. Absolute fabrication. Let the record show that I, the asshole here, do not believe the wind is my grandma. That’s not to say I fully believe my grandma is gone, I just don’t need spiritual symbols to obfuscate her very real effect.
Her influence continues to exist in a much more meaningful way than wind. She affected my grandpa, parents, cousins, siblings, me, and numerous others in a massively positive way. That’s no spiritualism – that’s literally and immediately true. I have a wonderful opportunity to not only continue that butterfly effect but to amplify it through my means. To do more than she was able. I really like some aspects of stoicism, even though TikTok and YouTube have made the whole stoic movement unintentionally a caricature. There is a stoic idea of reaching our potential because it is our nature to do so. “Don’t ask for things to happen as you wish, but wish for things to happen as they do — and you will be happy.” – Epictetus. It is your effect that matters, not your precondition. I like this idea quite a bit. I feel my grandma did this despite a lot of bad preconditions. I suspect a lot of those who we’ve lost have as well.
Please don’t let this writing come off as a lack of religiosity or belief. I would love to meet my grandma and others when we’ve both passed on from this orb. I just don’t feel that needs to happen for my grandma’s life to be valid or meaningful. We have such an obsession with holding onto things as is. For all the change life has, we can’t handle it happening to us very well. I don’t think we need to imbue the wind with her for her life to have a continued effect, or for her meaning to be known to us. We can appreciate and understand the real effect of those we’ve lost and build towards heaven here, as my grandma did.
Colin