Grief is a somewhat curious process. It is definitely not this step by step process
they say it is. It's not like you master one level and go on to the
next. At least for me it is not. What really happens is more like
flipping back and forth between the stages. Like you think you grasp
this new reality now and you're mind is otherwise occupied for a
while or you sleep, but then you look up and - wham - it hits you
again and you are right back where you started.
Then you are back
to asking yourself if this really is the new reality now? If this is
a world now in which this person no longer exists? Or if it has all
just been a bad dream? Which might sound like a horrible cliche, but
it is how I feel - or at least the most fitting articulation of this
feeling that I can think of. Or maybe I think of it, precisely because it is such a cliche and my mind is just so occupied processing the new
reality and in no condition to come up with more original
expressions.
However that may
be, it is not the worst part of the experience. The worst part is not
even the guilt about all the bad things you ever thought or said
about them. That will go away pretty soon. No, the worst part is the self-deprecating question of
whether or not you were close or invested enough to justify your
pain – no matter how close or closely related you actually where, I
might add. And I don't know if this is just me or if other people
feel this as well, because this is the particular monster I never
dare to touch upon in conversations. Funerals are the habitats it
really thrives in - among all those other people and their pain and
anecdotes about things you were hitherto totally oblivious about -
there and then it gets its biggest growth spurt. And this monster stays with
you even after the worst of the pain has passed. And its company
makes the next of its kind thrive even better. Maybe that is one
reason why I get so much more affected the older I get and the more
people cease to be.
I remember my
first funeral. It was a somewhat distant relative that I had seen a
couple of times, but was never close to. My grandmother said it would
be good for me to come for “practice.” So that it would not be as
bad when it was someone that had mattered more. She could not have
been more wrong. This is not the kind of thing you can practice. I
know that now. I don't know if she does.
I have been to
several funerals at this point and merely one wedding. What does that say
about me? I study cultures from the past – their relationship with
their dead and funeral rites among other things. And I have come to think that
funerals are more for the living then they are for the dead. The
question is for which of the living? Not me, evidently, because
funerals do not give me closure or comfort like I know they do for some other people - on the contrary. My
grieving and healing happens elsewhere in much more private venues
and rituals.
