Pat Heywood
scattered rumination on the deaths of others
by pat heywood
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Everybody I know, have ever known, will ever know, will die.
In July of 2002, I was eleven. I found out that my father, who I had never met, died. Five months later, my mother, who I had certainly met, who raised me up through that point in life, who I loved dearly, died.
Shakespeare wrote that “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” We are all storytellers, each authoring a magnum opus: our self. We begin with the name we are given, which could perhaps be considered the title of this story. Much is written for us, as backstory, beyond agency, through sheer randomness… the body we are given, the ailments we have, or don’t, our class, our environment, how we are loved, what we have lost, and who we have lost.
For some of us, maybe most, this story is all that matters. These stories founded modern civilization, they created capitalism, they fought wars, they have saved lives, and they have killed. Yes, our stories are, I believe, fundamentally, all illusions. Illusions that provide our lives with meaning.
For all of us sentient beings, life is, and always will be, tied inextricably to death.
When people who we don’t know die, unquestionably a beyond-vast majority of deaths, our reactions fluctuate from distant sympathy, to intense tribalism, to apathy. Many of us are facing this now, as we live through the COVID-19 global pandemic, where we watch the death rate of our fellow human being’s increasing, flattening, decreasing, most as numbers on our screens. We, hopefully, feel sorry, sympathy, empathy, for these figures we imagine grieving, who we will never know, but we compartmentalize, perhaps necessarily, this kind of death on an individual level because our sanity cannot face the kind of weight. This is also true during normal non-pandemic times, but death feels less omnipresent then for many. These deaths are not, at least directly, part of the story of our self.
Inevitably, some of this death we will know personally.
When people we know die, we are not sorry for them, the deceased, or at least we should not be, as they are gone. We are sorry for ourselves. We are sorry for all who knew them. We are sorry that they must continue on, living with the absence of someone they, we, loved. This is, very directly, part of that story of our self. In the case of this personal essay, my story.
For much of my life, I have defined myself by this latter sort of death. I felt that my life had had so much to do with who I had lost, and I worried about what it would mean for me in the future. But death is not something we can circumvent, which means we should not try to.
This is not the same as being unfazed by the deaths of others. On the contrary, we should all do everything we can, as long as we are living, to assure that our fellow sentient beings are living fulfilling lives, in whatever that word means to them. This is why I have cheered for our healthcare workers every single night for the past seven weeks. Improving the quality of life of every person, so long as they are living, may be the single most important thing to a moral, sustainable society.
Last month, George Saunders mused on the podcast Sugar Calling: “I read somewhere that there’s a meditation you can do where you imagine a person that you love very much drowning just beyond your reach. And that feeling that comes up when you do that is actually compassion. I’m sure another part of that meditation is you imagine somebody who isn’t so close to you drowning out of your reach, and you could actually grow your love in that way, I think.”
It is proven that meaningful social interactions make human beings, and I apologize for using this word as I feel it has been corrupted in so many ways, happier. We are social beings. What death represents, in that way, and in these stories of our selves, is some loss of that happiness. Because of that, I choose to be sorry for every loss anybody has ever suffered, and will ever suffer, in all its lingering manifestations But we must recognize death’s fundamental place in all life. It is not an obstacle to overcome. It is inevitable, and mostly without inherent meaning, or ration, which does not fit in neatly with our self-authored story.
In 2010, I was in my second year of college and my grandmother, who went on to raise me after my mom (her daughter) died, was hospitalized. She had acute COPD for many years, and her left lung collapsed in the middle of the night as a result, leading to a series of health complications that had her forced her in a hospital bed, on a ventilator, for months. After my mom died, I became so paralyzingly fearful of losing my grandmother, who is really my second mother, that even the thought of her dying made me shut down. I knew I could not take it. But during this hospitalization, I became so sure she was going to die that I began to grieve her loss, even while she was still living.
She ended up surviving. At age 87, she is still alive. I am overjoyed to still have her around, but her recovery was not a scene of inspiration. She did not overcome the obstacle of death. Medical professionals were able to prolog her life. The fact is that at some point, she will die, and I've accepted that, just like I will die, just like you will die, just like we, and everyone we love, will die. Given that this is true, why is death considered such a morbid conversation topic? I think about it all the time, but I am not a hypochondriac, nor am I without joy.
I consider what is left behind after death. All of these things we collect throughout our stories: houses, cars, clothing, technology… all these material goods we never really own, even if we describe them as such in our stories. In truth, they are borrow through the course of our lifetimes, to be repurposed after death. Memories are left for us who continue on living. In these, we find a symbiotic relationship between comfort and suffering, skewing one way or another depending on the cause of death, which can be especially painful when unjust, or unfair, random, without meaning… because it is. We want, need, to rationalize, but some foundational parts of existing are without ration, without meaning in the content of the story of our self, and death is one of them. That may not make it any easier to cope or to grieve, but it’s a fact I think about often and does bring me some comfort. I know I will never find meaning or ration in death, and I can hold onto it as part of myself, is what is left. That is painful and true. I can’t say for certain it was the episode with my grandmother that changed the way I think about death, as I feel that would require arrogance of my own mind, that my thoughts are somehow more knowing than anyone else (they are not), but it is my hunch.
As for what happens after death, to the dead, my personal choice is to not glom onto dogma, as they all just sound and feel under the umbrella of Shakespeare’s foundational wisdom. I do not aim to offend anyone that does believe in something,. but it also should not matter what my opinion on the matter is, because there is something true out there, and I acknowledge it will always be out of my reach. That being said, I am most comforted by my own interpretation of reincarnation (rebirth, transmigration). Pieces of our souls, whatever that word may mean, carried into new living sentient beings, with this cycle continuing on. In popular culture, these feelings are often personified as ghosts, haunting us, as if these dead have qualms to settle with us living. What we are haunted by is our own minds, and these vacancy within ourselves left by death, holes we are unable to fill with ration, as much as we wish we could, because we are trying to avoid the deaths of others, and avoiding looking inward in the present moment.
Last year I went to Country Mayo in Ireland and hiked up Crough Patrick, which is considered the “holiest” mountain in Ireland (that’s saying something). It was here, in 441 AD, that Saint Patrick made his pilgrimage involving fasting for forty days. I cannot say I fasted for even forty minutes before the hike, nor did I have any religious epiphanies in my solitude. But when I was almost at the peak of this three-hour hike, of the way through the hike, I hit a point where the fog was so dense that I could not see what was behind me, nor could I see what was in front of me. All I could see was most of my body and the earth below me.
The death I have experienced in my life does not define my story. It is a part of who I am.
Like my body in the fog on that mountain, death is not behind me, or in front of me, but with me always.
My grandmother says she thinks we (myself, her, and my mother) knew each other in a past life. She thinks we were Eskimos. I am not sure if that’s true, but I hold onto that as part of her story, at this moment, and maybe that’s what she wanted all along.
