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Next To Die
cookies
19 Jun 2005
When she was little, all she knew was death. She experienced little happiness and much confusion. No one taught her how to grieve. She was never coached on how to behave at the funerals she was forced to attend. Most times she did not know who had died, or if they were any relation to her. During one of the many services, she asked her mother why everyone always cried. Her mother reprimanded her for interrupting and told her not to ask any more questions. She concluded that crying was just what you did a funeral. She didn't ask again, even though her unanswered question nagged at her. Many more questions formed in her brain with every funeral she attended. If everyone is supposed to cry, then why do some people laugh? What do they do with the people after they're dead? What's it like to die? How does one feel after death?
The preachers all mentioned things like spirit and souls, suffering and pain, and better places. What is spirit and soul? What place is better than here on earth? She couldn't imagine living on Mercury as an angel. She constantly asked herself questions about death. She always wanted to know more about death and its processes. Her questions she never voiced; her thoughts she never shared.
Her father brought home the paper every Wednesday night and Sunday morning. For the longest time the only thing she read was the obituaries, but soon she began to focus on the stories about shootings, murders, and other criminal cases. She wondered how some people could have the balls to kill someone else, to snuff out their spirit and soul, to cause pain and suffering.
Soon after her 14th birthday each death began affecting her on a more emotional level. For the first time she attended the funeral of one of her direct relations. Her grandmother on her father's side, who smoked constantly, had died from a heart attack. She didn't know how to react to the news. She felt numb standing over the casket, looking down at someone who no longer existed. To no longer exist--to know and do nothing---they were scary thoughts.
Her beloved dog went next. She cried and cried over his grave, but the tears felt fake.
The next year her grandfather on her father's side passed. She cried then too, but was more confused than sad. Maybe everyone cried at funerals because they were confused and not sad.
For a few years she attended no funerals, though death still occurred. All her unanswered questions faded from her mind. She subconciously decided that she no longer needed to worry about death.
Her great-grandmother on her mother's side, her grandfather's mother, and her grandfather all went three months in a row. Her family was torn and tattered, seemingly with no hope of healing.
She came to fear death, and what happens after. Her overactive imagination invented millions of ways she could die. Images flashed through her head--a crime scene with her dead body being carted off to the morgue, all of her family standing around her casket at the funeral, a car she was riding in slamming into the gaurdrail on a bridge and plowing through, vaulting into the swift current below. She even envisioned herself watching her old body being lowered into the ground as some lady sings Amazing Grace out of tune. She couldn't deal with the images; they were killing her from the inside out, sending her into an unwanted mental state of depression.
She noticed on the tv all the news reports about teenagers committing suicide, about movie stars overdosing on drugs. She once thought suicide was the answer. When she tried to perform it, she remembered how scared she was of the after effect of death. She thought of all the funerals she'd been to, and how all the people cried. She remembered the images from inside her head--the looks on her family's faces: the devastation, the anguish, the regret. She knew then that she couldn't go through with it. And she hadn't even started thinking about what would become of her soul--if there was such a thing.
Her mother found her after she'd decided not to go through with it. She reached to her daughter with open arms, the two of them bridging a gap that had been growing steadily for ten plus some odd years.
They talked together in length about the topic of death. She told her mother about not really grieving, but pretending to. She told her about the images she'd seen and the fear they'd provoked within her. She asked all the questions she'd kept bottled up in a far corner of her mind. Together they couldn't answer them. They talked for hours on end until they'd debated everything twice. With nothing left to say, they slept.
Several decades later, her mother requested a visit from her daughter. The disease had been killing her slowly for years, and she felt her time was near. But she couldn't leave without telling her daughter something she had learned.
When her daughter arrived, the false tears automatically started to fall down her cheeks. She bent over her mother for a hug. Her mother wiped away the fake tears and and instructed that she sit down. Sitting next to her mother in that room, with the nurses going in and out, the hospital smell invading her nose, her mother told her the great secret she'd learned. She wasn't afraid of death, and said her daughter need not be afraid either.
"Death is something natural, dear, and we must all learn to accept it. It takes some people many years to discover what death is about, but when they do, they cannot possibly relate their knowledge; it is a knowledge too complex to share. It cannot be described in language, but must be communicated in feeling. This of course, is impossible."
Her mother died that night, holding her daughter's hand. She hadn't said anything to her, except "I love you," but had sat and listened to what she was being told. She thought over her mother's comments as she waited for the rest of her family to show up. She knew she couldn't just stop fearing death; she knew it had to be something she did gradually.
She attended her mother's funeral the next week, and went about her life. With the support of her husband, she learned how to grieve, and allowed herself to grieve properly for her mother. She vowed to herself that she would never falsely grieve again, that each tear shed would be shed true; she promised herself to learn to accept death, to respect it.
She did not die a horrible death. She died rather peacefully for the condition that she had. After she was done grieving for her mother she taught children how to deal with death. She made an impact, helping youth understand and cope with death. The world she created is better than the one we're in now.
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