Everyone has a story to say about death. About how somebody survived death by pure, sheer luck. About how somebody almost survived. About how death struck somebody like thunder. All pointless, but nevertheless, they are told and retold. Unattached and emotionlessly. But overflowing with pity and sometimes as if it were a novelty.
As I hear them, I want to scream and ask them all to shut up. Tell them all that their stories are just that-stories. They do not make the pain go away. They do not bring a person back from the dead. They do not help the shattered family, coping bravely, feel any less unbroken.
Regular chitter-chatter seems so banal. It leaves me wondering how so many trivialities could be talked, sent out into the cosmos, when someone has lost their father, her husband for almost thirty years. When death is such a regular, recurrent feature, how could one lead a life immune to this overpowering knowledge?
1 comment:
Beloved,
If I were to say, it is the only certainty we have, would you turn away?
Does it really make life banal and hollow? Or more complex and richer? If this is all we have, and yet, cannot possess, what is life and loss if not a series of memory?
There is no illusion. Pain and its cold stretches stem from love. It gives us meaning. Don't be sad.
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