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Death rocks our world, I read last night. Not in the cool Mick Jagger “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name” sort of way.
But hell, sympathy for the devil apart, death really rocks. Our world is just never the same once death comes knocking at your door.
People drop like flies around me – I’m of that age, you know – but I always hold on to my one and only pain: Beloved’s death. I’m still asked about my grief 13 years later. Unless there’s wine involved, I dry-eyed hug with platitudes of “it gets better; you just always wear it”.
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But it’s a leetle lie: you do stop grieving. You never forget. But you do start living.
That sentence deserves a line on its own because that’s your life now: your world will never be the same again but, hell, it keeps on turning. And death then stays with you; always.
It scares you. Not your own death, but you fear for those you deeply love.
You see your parents becoming helpless; you get scared about your far-away child when you read about a body that washed up on Camps Bay; you have a deep fear you’ll find your high son unresponsive after “one too many”; you decide against a new partner because you just don’t want to bury him, too.
Death becomes you. You see it in your puppet mouth with its harsh lines; your arms covered with paper skin that wrinkles when you point.
You learn to dance with death. You keep a smile plastered; you point with a chiffon sleeve that softens the blow to the eye. But you always know: death’s only sting is in your heart. It’s broken, but it will heal.
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Fill those cracks with golden memories like the Japanese fill their cracked bowls with strips of gold. And know your world was rocked like Julian Barnes’ when he lost his wife in his ode to her,
Levels of Life: Grief is human and while there are pills to help us forget – and everything else – there are no pills to cure it. The grief-struck are not depressed, just properly, appropriately, mathematically (it hurts
exactly as much as it is worth) sad.
And then you, unashamedly, cry… You can. It’s your pain. And only yours.