Grief, or rather the lack of it...

I went to the cemetery today to visit the plots where my grandparent’s ashes were scattered. And it was beautiful. The aesthetics of the place were amazing, and by that I don’t mean that everything was laid out in a specific way or that there was order and symmetry. It was the disorder of the place that was something special – a grassy verge with bunches of flowers laid against the blossom trees, birthday cards resting against plaques, father’s day cards, ornaments (even though there was a sign which said that such things were not allowed). It was an emotional aesthetic and I could not help but be moved by it. I didn’t know that people took birthday and father’s day cards to relatives that were dead. The thought had never even entered my mind. Yet, although I marvelled at the aesthetic of the place, I somehow could not understand it. Death has always been a somewhat elusive concept for me in that I do not seem to have the ability to grieve. Whether or not this is a character flaw on my part I do not know, but when told that my grandparents were dead I did not feel a single melancholic emotion even though I loved them both very much and were very close to them. This might sound a little disturbing to some people, but it is described perfectly in We Need to Talk About Kevin where the main character Eva writes that

“We have explicit expectations of ourselves in specific situations – beyond expectations; they are requirements. Some of these are small: If we are given a surprise party, we will be delighted. Others are sizable: If a parent dies, we will be grief-stricken. But perhaps in tandem with these expectations is the private fear that we will fail convention in the crunch. That we will receive the fateful phone call and our mother is dead and we feel nothing. I wonder if this quiet, unutterable little fear is even keener than the fear of the bad news itself: that we will discover ourselves to be monstrous” (Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin, p. 92).

I have never thought myself to be monstrous, but it is easy to see why people would think I am as I’ve uttered the unutterable – I do not feel anything when relatives die. Do not think that I am completely without sentiment or that I’ve not latched on to some integral part of life – I understand that I am expected to grieve, expected to be sad. I even expected myself to be melancholy when my grandparents died. But the most sadness I felt was directed towards my mother because she was sad and I could not understand why I was not. I am told that sometimes it takes months or years for the death of someone close to really settle in and grieving to begin. I guess I’m still waiting.

Grief, to me, is the melancholic expression of loss. It is a melancholic reaction to a certain void, a lack, a space that has suddenly opened where the deceased once was. I cannot understand this. Surely when a person dies, the immediate first step should be to celebrate that person’s life? Instead of ‘mourning’, why not consider all the things the deceased accomplished in his or her life and perhaps think about how their take on life matches up to your own. Death is the perfect time to consider whether your principles are ones that will give you the opportunity to live a worthwhile life because it is perhaps the most significant reminder that we are all going to die one day.

There is an aspect of the language of death that strikes me as awkward. People speak of their relatives as looking down on them as if they are some kind of omnipresent entity. Am I the only person who finds this notion disturbing? Relatives would not only look down on you when you’re doing something that would make them proud like winning a rowing contest or passing a degree, you could not pick and choose what they look down on. They would look down on your most sordid moments and your most unpleasant moments. So although the notion of omnipresent relatives may be a form of relief to some people I would find it somewhat constricting if it were to be true. Of course, I cannot rationally believe it to be true. Because I cannot conceive the mind and body to be separate, I cannot rationally believe that the mind survives after the brain dies. When the brain dies, so does consciousness, and that is the end. Yes, it’s a difficult concept to grasp because we have such a strong sense of self, but because I know that death will be the end of ‘me’, the ‘I’ that constantly recreates itself throughout life, I feel an urgency to make sure that my life is one which is worthwhile.