On Death
Death is universal. If there is anything that binds us, it is the indisputable fact that we will one day die. Facing our own individual mortality means facing, and ultimately embracing, our humanity.
Death brings the question of identity. Who are we, if our loved ones are no longer with us? In seeing a loved one dead, there is a shock. Wordsworth’s A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal reminds us of this. Suddenly, the person who laughed, cried, breathed, was full of colour and life, is motionless, cold, colourless, and, to us, slightly deformed. In our memories, and in our lived experience, our bodies, our minds, our souls have their imprints, their lives. To see them motionless is to accept that they are “a thing that could not feel.” Nothing we say or do—our touch, our tears, our cries, our desperation, our longing, our grief, our loss—none of that can reach them.
And yet, as much as the poem speaks of the ontological shock of death, it equally portrays the grief and loss in a calm, almost rational, way. It does fully capture that horror of being lost, the particular feeling of not knowing quite what to do, where to go, how to be. In Fleabag, the main character, having lost her mum, captures this beautifully:
Fleabag: I don’t know what to do with it.
Boo: With what?
Fleabag: With all the love I have for her. I don’t know where to put it now.
It is the physical absence that is unbearable. We need a person to relate to, in flesh and blood, so they can receive and hold our love. Without it, we are suddenly empty. Eventually, of course, that love will find its path to someone and something else. But there will always be a part that aches for the return of the person and for the love to flow back to them.
I remember the day my mom died. It was an early, cold January morning. The room she was sleeping in was oddly silent. I knew it was all over just by the absence of sound. My sister was sleeping in the other room. “Mama je umrla. Ajde, moramo …” I don’t remember what I said after, just the blank expression on my sister’s face. We prepared for this moment for months. We bought the clothes, the essential oils and the ointments, all to prepare her for the funeral. We bathed her, dressed her wounds, and dressed her in what we thought would be nice clothes she would like. We even put some makeup on her. We did, however, forget to put some shoes on. She is roaming the afterlife barefoot, we joked later.
It was very much like a scene from the Japanese film Departures, just that it was the two of us and not a third person doing it. I understand now the absolute necessity of a third person to prepare you and your loved one for the final goodbye. I say final, because that is the last time I was able to touch her. Almost five years have passed since that day. And not a moment goes by that I do not miss her. No matter how many beautiful people enrich my life, there is a part of me that grieves and will likely always cry for its mom to return.
Death is a rupture. It questions not only our sense of self, but our sense of belonging. Suddenly, there is an experience of being outside of the ordinary flow of time. The world carried on; no matter how lost I was in my grief, the world carried on, and I was forced to eventually carry on with it. But not only did I feel out of time, but I also felt out of place. Every time someone shouted “mom” in the street, or I overheard someone talking with their mom on the phone, or saw someone with their mom, were all a painful reminder that there is a circle of experience I no longer belong to. People are kind, and they mean well, but the experience of death separates us. They cannot relate to the depth of loss, and I cannot relate it to them.
Even after the shock of loss and grief subsides, there is a period of in-betweenness. And in many ways, that in-betweenness remains, mediated by the otherness that the experience of death gives. Love repairs the rupture, or at least it does to a certain extent. I found love in different people who have taught me how to practice love: a practice of care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust. Grief can be seen as a situated, interpretive, and communicative activity.
Situated encapsulates the social function of mourning as it unfolds in a given time and a given socio-cultural context. Interpretive captures the meaning-making process; put all of those moments differently when we question the meaning of life, death, love, or critically reflect on values and practices that were central in our lives to give us meaning. For some people, that is art, for others it is religion, and for others some other spiritual practice. Communicative reflects our interactions with others, in written, spoken, and non-verbal forms. Activity means that grief is something that we do as opposed to something that happens to us, and we endure. It is similar to the idea of love as a practice, as an activity, that requires a conscious decision and evolves around central values, such as trust, communication, honesty, and integrity.
In reconstruction, grief is transformative. And it is not just the bereaved that are transformed, or their relationship with and within their social community. It is also the relationship with the dead that is transformed. Continuing bonds add to our lived experience of grief as a framework to understand both our individual relationship with the loved ones we lost, the difficulty of grief and mourning, but equally the importance of such a lived experience for the meaning-making process. Reconstruction of ourselves, or making meaning of our experience, is at the core of bereavement. Klass, citing Attig, emphasised:
As we address the tasks of grieving…we reestablish coherence in our present living; we reestablish continuity in the ongoing stories in our lives; and we recover old meanings and find new ones in the larger wholes in which we are, or become, parts.
As they are intersubjective, they are also relational. We engage in meaning-making activities also by considering the social and communal belonging. That is why rituals are so important. They provide a space for engagement with others. Sinking “into somebody else’s hell means experiencing the reality the bereaved are experiencing.” (Klass) The relationality within a community of bereaved or in support of bereaved requires openness, presence, and availability that create trust. It is a community bound by a practice of love.
Continuing bonds do not mean severing the bond with our deceased loved ones, but a transformation of the bond. We reconstruct ourselves, and as we find a place for ourselves in the new reality marked by the absence and presence of our lost ones, we are able to find a way for them to stay present in our lives.
The relationship between the living and the dead, therefore, is a fabric of our individual and social life. This series will explore the complexity of that relationship as it is bound in experiences of death, love, loss, and belonging. I will be reading and reflecting on the works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and film. The task I have set for myself is to have an outlet for these thoughts, but also to work towards some coherence, or thread, that will connect my lived experience of loss with that of others. So the series is really my way of working with and through the idea of continuing bonds.