Death and our Response

A year before I was born my older brother Graeme was killed in an accident. That death had, and still hs, a profound effect on my family to this day.

Other than that I was very lucky. I really had no deaths of people that I knew and cared about for most of my growing up life.

However, as I have written recently, the family moved from a tiny little town and school where I knew, at least by face, everyone in the school and where an older Sister and Brother went to that school as well as a younger sister that had just started, to a much bigger town with several different schools and I knew no one in the school that I went to except the younger sister. And we had seperate recesses so did not really see each other.

What I did not understand was that I had the death of all of the relationships at the previous school, all the teachers, the school itself, the house we lived in, the school bus drivers, to mourn. And I never did.

I never thought of those things as Relationships. So here I am trying to adapt to a new life while carrying around a load of unrecognized grief with no outlet.

Over the years other realationships come and go.

And then, in the two and one half years that I was in High School, each year a popular and well known student committed suicide. I knew all three of them, none real well as I did not travel in the "Popular" circles. And each death had an efect on me.

And then when I was 17 my Step Father died. He was 55. Now there is a lot of stuff around this one. We did not have a good relationship. Near the end we had tried. There was just too much in the way and not enough time.

At his funeral everyone was really upset. I was numb. I had nothing left inside me. I had just spent a very traumatic 10 months in Toronto ON and it had reduced my capacity to feel down to nothing.

And as time went by I had more relationships and situations come and go. Only one or two involved physical death. All the rest were deaths of relationship, not that many of them were healthy, of one sort or another.

And then in 1994 the only Grandparent I had ever known passed away. And again, we had a complicated relationship.

So my Mum and I flew down to North Carolina for the services. And a lot went on there. I will not go into details because it does not matter.

The biggest thing that happened was I was on a quiet simmer for the entire time. You see, I had to be "Good". Which meant that I could not get wasted the way I wanted too. I was a year and a few months away from going to my first 12 Step meeting. And deep in my, what was left of it, soul I just wanted to get wasted and stay wasted. And I did not.

So I quietly seethed and I do not believe that anyone really had any idea that I was Furious inside. My Mum told me later that she was proud of how I handled myself.

After some "experiences" I finally stopped using and started trying on this new way of living called Recovery. And that has been a journey and a half let me tell you.

There was a guy I met when I had just a little bit of clean time. He was a really funny dude. Incredible sense of humour. Everybody, including me, liked this dude.

After several months the word went out. His downstairs neighbors called for a wellness check because he had not been seen for a few days and there was this really weird smell coming from his apartment.

When they went in they found his bloated body, thus the weird smell, with the needle still in his arm. He had been dead for several days already.

That was my first, by no means last, experience of death in recovery.

And it hurt. There is an old saying in recovery, "Great News!!! Now that you have stopped using you get your feelings back. Terrible News!!! Now that you have stopped using you get your feelings back". I had been numb for so long and now I had no tools to deal with my feelings. So all feelings, espacially grief, were overwhelming.

And I still persevered. Even through it all I kept going. Part of it was I had surrounded myself with people who were doing the same thing that I was doing. I was allowing myself to accept, some, help from others for maybe the first time in my life. And I also did not feel like I was completely alone in this world either. Again, quite possibly for the first time in my life.

In January 2000 my older brother called me. My Father had passed away in the night. We had a difficult relationship. That is starting to be a theme for me. Yes?

I had been doing the Steps of Recovery and had a very hard time with Steps 8 (We made a list of persons we had harmed and became willing to make amends to them all) and 9 (Made direct amends to such people whenever possible except when to do so would injure them or others.). And my Father should have been on that list, and I was still to busy blaming him to really own my stuff. And he definately should have been made amends to, and see above.

So, after some months of work, I finally got a letter written that was not "Yeah I'm sorry and by the way what you did...". Now, he was still alive. He lived 45 minutes away from me. And I sat on it. I never called. I never went up there to see him. And I never addressed, put a stamp on, and sent that letter. I sat on it still consumed with my own blame and lack of responsibility.

And then he died.

For the funeral I asked my Sponsor, who is also a good friend, to go with me. He consented. For which I will always be grateful.

Folks, it was a wonderful service. We all got a chance to share our memories. And a lot of catharsis happened. And after I while I went to a meeting. I did not want to et high. I just wanted to go and be with my other family.

A little while later the realization that I had missed my chance to truly clean up my side of the street with him hit. And I went a little crazy. Self loathing and recriminations played a huge part in this. I did not really know how to deal with thi. Forunately, I had people.

A bunch of years later, with many deaths in recovery happening both from just getting old and relapsing, my Uncle died. He was a retired Marine who had been a civilian nurse for a long time. And he got old.

Had his service in the middle of the pandemic. Was a beautiful, very Catholic, service. Say what you will about the Catholic Church, and I do, they have some wonderfully moving ceromonies.

A while later my Aunt got sick, brain tumor, and after a bit passed away. I went to Florida for her rememberence ceromony, which was really nice, and am waiting for spring for her final internment.

My Mum is 87 years old. I know her time is coming sooner rather than later. And I also know that no matter how much one prepares oneself that one is never ready for the death of a parent.

I am 60 years old. In my 61st journey around the sun on this little rock we call home. And my body is letting me know that I am closer to the end than the beginning. If things go right I have between 20 and 30 years left.

I say all this to say that something I heard years ago, "We are all going to die, yet no one believes it", is so very true. And even though we know our loved ones and friends are going to die we do not believe that either.

Humanity has spent it's entire history trying to make death less scary. We invented realms and stories to make it more paletable. We Believe in Heaven and Hell to believe that their is a life after we die and that we can be worthy of Heaven while those we judge are worthy of Hell.

We have also set up many elaborite rituals around death for those who are affected by the death of someone. We call them funerals. Some ancient peoples just left their dead outside to be eaten by animals. Some created elaborate ceromonies where they burned the bodies. Others mummified bodies for tombs. And many others.

And in all of these things the people left behind tried to tell themselves that their loved ones were in a place where they would wait for the rest to join them.

All this because our real fear, the one we cannot even acknowledge to ourselves, is the fear of losing our ID, our Identity, the whatever it is that we think makes each of us US.

So we have created the Afterlife, Transmigration of Souls, Reincarnation, etc. Anything that we can so that we can hold on to the idea that is the Self.

At the end of the day we Know that we are the Center of the Universe anf the idea of a Universe existing without our SELF being at the center of it is just to damn scary.

So everything we do around the idea of death is driven by our Fear. Our fear that we will no longer exist. That the Universe will be able to keep going quite fine without us. That we are merely a small and temperary piece of a much larger organism.

So, whether it is the Death of a situation, the death of a relationship, the death of an idea, the death of an aquaintence, the death of a loved one, Death itself scares us. Because that is the ultimate place of Powerlessness for us. We cannot stop death. Even though we try. We cannot bargain with death, so we created this God thing and try to bargain with it.

And it is all driven by fear. The fear that WE are not really that important and that we will be gone once this body dies and within a few years everyone that knew us will be gone and then we will truly be gone.

So what would happen if we, Human Beings, gave up our Fear of Death? Our Fear of not Being after this body is finished. Our Fear of each other and everything?

I do not know kinfolk. What I do know is that we and the Universe would be a much better place for us and everyone else.