How Do You Mourn Death?
Sometimes it seems the universe is not poised to let me out into the ether. Perhaps there is time and then there is a better time. I only know that I can be doing almost anything when I suddenly need to let the words out or they will trip a wire in my head. There is almost always some message to myself in them but I don't always start off knowing what it is. Tonight I come to the page completely blind. It is terrifying to realize that I probably say the same thing every single time; that I have only one thing to say; that it has been said a thousand times before. Better than tonight. Better than right now.
I've felt it rising up since I was too small to speak. No, that's wrong. I can't remember anything from before I could speak. It is more accurate to say that I've felt it rising up since I can remember being. An irrepressible surge of a message that is so breathtakingly simple that I will spend an entire lifetime trying to tell you what it is. You will lose patience with me just like everyone does. Let it be like a prayer: this repetitive communion of words digging into the fabric of your night-time to reveal what you cannot die without knowing.
Just like that- I am speaking of death.
I am wondering how long it will take people to reconnect with death. To find their way back to the ritual, the language, and the pace of it.
Every time I think of death I wonder how the pig feels just before the nail gun hits its skull or the knife glides quietly across its neck. I don't want to think it's wrong but part of me always does. A little part of me dies every time I see the acres of animal flesh wrapped up all shiny in plastic with pale red fluids lingering in droplets. I feel the same shock when I see all that dead skin and marbled flesh and think of the being it used to be that others feel when they hear of human death. I feel the shock of human death too. I just can't distinguish between the two.
The only way the human spirit feels different to me in death is if I somehow mark it, drink it, watch it, answer it, draw it, memorialize it, or sing it. Death is just as momentous an occasion as birth. But we have dispensed with the banners, the parties, the processions, and the ritualized careful wearing of it.
The greatest honor I have ever done for anyone was wearing a black arm band for my Grandfather when he died. He understood the honor of the black band I wore for my husband's uncle's death and was so impressed and touched that anyone still commemorated the passing of life with an outward sign of mourning and while he was living I promised him I'd wear it for him as well.
I made the band myself. It was a curiosity to the people I worked with and it was awkward and strange and felt theatrical to speak of out loud, but it felt so completely right. So completely truthful and like the giant belly of a pregnant woman that shouts to the world that she is a sexual being who is making a life- wearing the black band for a death feels like carrying spirits on your arm with you everywhere, like wearing a shroud of death and shouting to the world that someone you love/admire/miss has gone forever beyond your reach and you are full of sorrow.
It is not fashionable to speak plainly of death. Not in my whole life has it been fashionable to display awareness of death out in the open. We whisper it in private. We cry behind walls. We put on a brave face, we pretend that life is the same, we choke down the fear, the sorrow, the abject horror.
It is the natural conclusion to life. Even in infants. We all have the amount of time we have and most of us are going to leave people behind us who are going to miss us and mourn us. Why is it considered so strange to wear death on your sleeve now? It used to be a way to mark something momentous. It was a way to help the living deal with their pain. Openly. It was a way to do it while demanding space and respect from others.
I am no Victorian. In spite of not being particularly provocative, revealing, sexual, or shiny. I am not in favor of a complicated ritual of graduated mourning clothes. I think it would be creepy to weave bracelets out of my love's hair to remember him by when he is gone. I am not personally a big fan of clinging to sorrow and mourning for long dreary years.
Yet.
Yet it seems that we have so completely disconnected from death in our desperation to never die ourselves that we have forgotten how to properly mourn. So we don't know what to do. Or, rather, most people don't know what to do. I know how to say good-bye. Do you?
Death deserves respect as much as it deserves our fear.
How do you mourn? How do you process that inevitable mirror to life?
I feel death everywhere as much as I feel life. In some ways I find births and babies distressing enough that I leave the celebrating of new life to the billions of people who are all excited about it. Babies don't need my joy. They don't need my blessing. Everyone loves a new baby. There is no shortage of balloons, cigars, excitement, well-wishing, hollering, jumping with joy, and presents. Babies don't need my welcome.
The dead need my goodbyes. Hardly anyone else is saying goodbye properly. Signaling the strange release that is a kind of converse joy- death isn't the penance to pay for life, it is simply the end of it. Death isn't a punishment for living but a natural closure. Live a minute, live five days, five years, five decades...believe it or not: it is the same. The same.
How one person goes may deserve more pity than how another exits. But dead is dead. Dying is just the wrap up to what we were given. Even a minute of life has value. Anything more is lucky.
When I die I want the people who loved me to wear a mourning arm-band. For a day, or a week, or a year. Whatever feels right. I don't want a scrap of mourning to extend beyond a year. There is structure to proper mourning. It signals to us when to hang on, when to let go. It gives us parameters for our pain and it gives permission to openly hurt. For a finite period of time. It gives us permission to grieve and permission to move on, to release the dead.
Proper mourning lets others know to give you space. Give you courage. Give you permission not to be as you always were before your moment changed, your equilibrium was busted open.
Proper mourning is graceful and lovely. It says we remember beyond ourselves.
It also reminds us that no one lives forever. We will all have our time in the sun and then we will move on. This is a non-denominational truth. It 100% doesn't matter what your spiritual beliefs are: we all die and whatever happens in that instant isn't about god or atheism or beliefs. Death does not require you to believe anything. It just is. It is.
It's part of the message that keeps playing in my head. That's been playing since I was a person with a memory. Probably since before then.
The message of life and the message of death are almost indistinguishable. Like identical twins who learn to speak and dress differently but who, when stripped down to bones, were still split from a single cell. Life and death were split from a single cell too.
I have both messages writ thick in blood on my walls. So do you. So do we all. Perhaps my only job here on earth is to remind us all of who we are. Collectively.
Sometimes I think I am charged with carrying death in my heart and in my dreams because I can take it better than others even though it makes me so tired sometimes. I am the wisdom long since packed up in acid-free tissue protecting treasures you've relegated to the dark, to the dust, to the farthest corners of your lives.
I spider across the windows you've closed against chill, I hang in webs of your making, waiting for you to unbend your heart and see true. See true again for the first time since you were born.
Don't be frightened. Being is a burden just as not being releases us. It is that simple.
Now hush. Hush. Sleep the sleep of people with the gift of a brand new day before them. There is no other way to be but to be moving forward.
Sleep now.
Hush.
I have worn the black band for:
Myrna Loy
Frank Sinatra
My Grandfather
Marlene Dietrich
Eric Williamson
Vernice Williamson
I did not wear it for Viella Williamson because I was timid about showing mourning for my mother in law and was more concerned for Philip's process. I wish now that I had because she deserved the honor and I would be easier if I had done it.
I've felt it rising up since I was too small to speak. No, that's wrong. I can't remember anything from before I could speak. It is more accurate to say that I've felt it rising up since I can remember being. An irrepressible surge of a message that is so breathtakingly simple that I will spend an entire lifetime trying to tell you what it is. You will lose patience with me just like everyone does. Let it be like a prayer: this repetitive communion of words digging into the fabric of your night-time to reveal what you cannot die without knowing.
Just like that- I am speaking of death.
I am wondering how long it will take people to reconnect with death. To find their way back to the ritual, the language, and the pace of it.
Every time I think of death I wonder how the pig feels just before the nail gun hits its skull or the knife glides quietly across its neck. I don't want to think it's wrong but part of me always does. A little part of me dies every time I see the acres of animal flesh wrapped up all shiny in plastic with pale red fluids lingering in droplets. I feel the same shock when I see all that dead skin and marbled flesh and think of the being it used to be that others feel when they hear of human death. I feel the shock of human death too. I just can't distinguish between the two.
The only way the human spirit feels different to me in death is if I somehow mark it, drink it, watch it, answer it, draw it, memorialize it, or sing it. Death is just as momentous an occasion as birth. But we have dispensed with the banners, the parties, the processions, and the ritualized careful wearing of it.
The greatest honor I have ever done for anyone was wearing a black arm band for my Grandfather when he died. He understood the honor of the black band I wore for my husband's uncle's death and was so impressed and touched that anyone still commemorated the passing of life with an outward sign of mourning and while he was living I promised him I'd wear it for him as well.
I made the band myself. It was a curiosity to the people I worked with and it was awkward and strange and felt theatrical to speak of out loud, but it felt so completely right. So completely truthful and like the giant belly of a pregnant woman that shouts to the world that she is a sexual being who is making a life- wearing the black band for a death feels like carrying spirits on your arm with you everywhere, like wearing a shroud of death and shouting to the world that someone you love/admire/miss has gone forever beyond your reach and you are full of sorrow.
It is not fashionable to speak plainly of death. Not in my whole life has it been fashionable to display awareness of death out in the open. We whisper it in private. We cry behind walls. We put on a brave face, we pretend that life is the same, we choke down the fear, the sorrow, the abject horror.
It is the natural conclusion to life. Even in infants. We all have the amount of time we have and most of us are going to leave people behind us who are going to miss us and mourn us. Why is it considered so strange to wear death on your sleeve now? It used to be a way to mark something momentous. It was a way to help the living deal with their pain. Openly. It was a way to do it while demanding space and respect from others.
I am no Victorian. In spite of not being particularly provocative, revealing, sexual, or shiny. I am not in favor of a complicated ritual of graduated mourning clothes. I think it would be creepy to weave bracelets out of my love's hair to remember him by when he is gone. I am not personally a big fan of clinging to sorrow and mourning for long dreary years.
Yet.
Yet it seems that we have so completely disconnected from death in our desperation to never die ourselves that we have forgotten how to properly mourn. So we don't know what to do. Or, rather, most people don't know what to do. I know how to say good-bye. Do you?
Death deserves respect as much as it deserves our fear.
How do you mourn? How do you process that inevitable mirror to life?
I feel death everywhere as much as I feel life. In some ways I find births and babies distressing enough that I leave the celebrating of new life to the billions of people who are all excited about it. Babies don't need my joy. They don't need my blessing. Everyone loves a new baby. There is no shortage of balloons, cigars, excitement, well-wishing, hollering, jumping with joy, and presents. Babies don't need my welcome.
The dead need my goodbyes. Hardly anyone else is saying goodbye properly. Signaling the strange release that is a kind of converse joy- death isn't the penance to pay for life, it is simply the end of it. Death isn't a punishment for living but a natural closure. Live a minute, live five days, five years, five decades...believe it or not: it is the same. The same.
How one person goes may deserve more pity than how another exits. But dead is dead. Dying is just the wrap up to what we were given. Even a minute of life has value. Anything more is lucky.
When I die I want the people who loved me to wear a mourning arm-band. For a day, or a week, or a year. Whatever feels right. I don't want a scrap of mourning to extend beyond a year. There is structure to proper mourning. It signals to us when to hang on, when to let go. It gives us parameters for our pain and it gives permission to openly hurt. For a finite period of time. It gives us permission to grieve and permission to move on, to release the dead.
Proper mourning lets others know to give you space. Give you courage. Give you permission not to be as you always were before your moment changed, your equilibrium was busted open.
Proper mourning is graceful and lovely. It says we remember beyond ourselves.
It also reminds us that no one lives forever. We will all have our time in the sun and then we will move on. This is a non-denominational truth. It 100% doesn't matter what your spiritual beliefs are: we all die and whatever happens in that instant isn't about god or atheism or beliefs. Death does not require you to believe anything. It just is. It is.
It's part of the message that keeps playing in my head. That's been playing since I was a person with a memory. Probably since before then.
The message of life and the message of death are almost indistinguishable. Like identical twins who learn to speak and dress differently but who, when stripped down to bones, were still split from a single cell. Life and death were split from a single cell too.
I have both messages writ thick in blood on my walls. So do you. So do we all. Perhaps my only job here on earth is to remind us all of who we are. Collectively.
Sometimes I think I am charged with carrying death in my heart and in my dreams because I can take it better than others even though it makes me so tired sometimes. I am the wisdom long since packed up in acid-free tissue protecting treasures you've relegated to the dark, to the dust, to the farthest corners of your lives.
I spider across the windows you've closed against chill, I hang in webs of your making, waiting for you to unbend your heart and see true. See true again for the first time since you were born.
Don't be frightened. Being is a burden just as not being releases us. It is that simple.
Now hush. Hush. Sleep the sleep of people with the gift of a brand new day before them. There is no other way to be but to be moving forward.
Sleep now.
Hush.
I have worn the black band for:
Myrna Loy
Frank Sinatra
My Grandfather
Marlene Dietrich
Eric Williamson
Vernice Williamson
I did not wear it for Viella Williamson because I was timid about showing mourning for my mother in law and was more concerned for Philip's process. I wish now that I had because she deserved the honor and I would be easier if I had done it.
Comments (6)
Death is the one thing that gives me anxiety more than anything else. It does not help to imagine that "not being" releases me. The only thing that I imagine is nothingness...and it's rather hard to imagine nothingness. It gives me palpitations and I can't breathe. It does not feel like a release at all, but a prison.
Posted by Jade | March 20, 2009 7:51 AM
Posted on March 20, 2009 07:51
Very timely for me. I have been trying to compose a post regarding this topic for several days but it just keeps getting longer and longer. I agree with so many things you wrote EXACTLY. I too, leave the celebrating of new life to others. Those departing need my attention. The acknowledging, the remembering, that is my charge. It always has been. Thanks for putting into a coherent, less rambling so many of my thoughts.
Posted by Tonia | March 20, 2009 8:19 AM
Posted on March 20, 2009 08:19
Angelina, I am struck almost wordless by your eloquence. Please always write, you give me so many strong concepts to chew on, and write so well about things that are difficult to put into words.
Two things immediately came into my mind upon reading this post.
One, I was wondering if you had ever read "Always Coming Home" by Ursula Leguin. It is an odd novel that includes a lot of fictional "future anthropology". The vivid description of the rituals of death and dying in the primary culture described in that book are both poetic and realistic.
And two, I was reminded of the year that I spent in Northern Idaho. As part of the job training to work as a Home health aide, we were offered as an option to also take the hospice training. Most of the young women in the class refused, they were completely uncomfortable with the idea. I thought it would be both useful and educational. The hospice program there had been started by the same woman who had started the home birthing program there ten years earlier. She spoke about her realisation that folks could reclaim the end of life in the same way as they had moved to reclaim the beginning, and bring it back as a vital part of their reality.
I don't remember ever not knowing that my life was finite.
Posted by alison | March 20, 2009 9:31 AM
Posted on March 20, 2009 09:31
I have never been able to accept death as a normal part of life. It slays me and leaves me feeling heavy and sad. Sure, when someone is very old and lived a good life, then I'm not quite so torn up but when a young life is stopped cold, it leaves me flat. We've lost several young kids who grew up with my kids, 7 I think, in the past 4 yrs and it is beyond incomprehensible. This week I have been completely overcome with grief for Natasha Richardson, like I knew her... And like Jade, the anxiety it gives me feels like a prison. However, I really like your armband as a sign of mourning. Powerful post, my friend.
Posted by Kathy | March 20, 2009 7:52 PM
Posted on March 20, 2009 19:52
As a Christian, I know to die or to 'experience death' within your inner man is to gain life in Christ. It is a rebirth as you said. It's like be refined through refiners fire, to come out more alive with less blemishes. It symbolise freedom, when you let your maker do a good work in you, for your salvation more importantly, and to turn you into his own masterpiece.
Posted by Cazza | March 23, 2009 6:00 AM
Posted on March 23, 2009 06:00
This was an interesting read, I tend to agree with you.
Posted by Shon Alpizar | February 8, 2010 11:40 AM
Posted on February 8, 2010 11:40