Dead: A Four-letter Word
Ronald’s birthday and the day Mum died was yesterday. I holed up in bed for most of it because I have been diagnosed with shingles. Every once in a while, I roused myself to go check on the birthday boy but the day was pretty much a bust. I didn’t light a candle, or play Schumann’s Of Foreign Lands & People; one of Ma’s favourite pieces that she’d come and stand at the living room door to hum as I plink-plonked my way through the notes.
So today’s beef are for those who are no longer with us and the phrases we use to obfuscate this hard fact. I’m firmly in the camp of say-it-as-it-is. When someone dies, they are dead. They have not ‘passed’ into some weird portal just over the horizon where those of us still in the ‘living’ can somehow visit or converse with them on a whim or worse, trot out idiotic euphemisms for the thing that’s coming for all of us. At best they are past (tense). Not passed, not with Jesus or the devil, not in a better place where angels flit. We die, and when we die, we are dead.
“It’s not a semantic argument. As soon as we start either misappropriating words or not using the actual words, then we start getting away from what we’re actually talking about.”
This particular bug bear ranks up there with my irrational hatred for the ubiquitous luxury SUV that parents at the private schools round these parts all appear to drive. I hear ‘passed’ but I want to hear that people dead. I want that certainty about death if nothing else. ‘Dead’ is the only reality here. There’s nothing that should/could soften its clarion throb. And I am drawn to discussions of any stripe on grief and dying probably because I am so terribly bad at it myself.
I witnessed Mum dying via WhatsApp. Death on social media if you can believe it. I still haven’t come to grips with those particular moments. No one was there for Dad for reasons around Covid and the wretched restrictions on visiting hours. I certainly didn’t see Julia dying, and the last memory I have of Michael was in a hospital bed in RPA with jaundice.
Those four deaths came to us all like rifle shots out of a gun: bam, bam, bam, bam. It was hard to keep up with the falling, fallen, and felled. But it’s little wonder that the breathtaking quickness of four people I knew dying is equal in my slowness to get to grips with them all gone. In this space of loss, I am floundering around to understand that gap.
In my subconscious quest to run my grief and unmooring to ground, I came across Greg Wise (who lives up to his last name & is Emma Thompson’s husband). He lost his sister Clare at age 51 to cancer. He says this about death: it’s not a semantic argument. As soon as we start either misappropriating words or not using the actual words, then we start getting away from what we’re actually talking about.
When Julia was alive, any attempt to talk about her cancer was met by a wall. I don’t know if that wall was denial, an attempt to minimise the horror and rage that she had it & we didn’t so what would we know? I don’t know if it was a misguided notion that if you don’t speak of it, it’s not happening (see denial), a pact she may have made with Kevin…it will remain the great mystery because there was no cinematic moment of revelation. And that’s not on Julia to provide but in my cock-eyed belief, I somehow expected her to be my spirit guide through her terror. Perhaps this is what death does to one: really fucks around with reality.
And the reality was death. It wasn’t ‘my truth’, some fake news item, a bit of propaganda, a conspiracy theory. It was utterly final. For Julia, Michael, my mother, my father…from 2017 to 2020 they all fell. And that’s barely touching the sides. Coming to grips with this ultimate repudiation and all the other deaths that will come after theirs is something I cannot control and will also continue to deny. But occasionally something breaks through my denial and confusion about this topic and it would serve me well to focus in on it because it may (or not) provide some raw solace for that emptiness now that they’re gone.
I have no answers about death. All my podcasts I’ve favourited about dying does not bring them back, the tears don’t cease, the anger remains but the relationships with these deceased people continues. Make of that what you will.