bereavement ramblings # 6

Posted by: inbetweennomore on: December 28, 2020

In: personal
Leave a Comment

When she died she took with her what was left of my faith. For me, God died at the same time she died, not on a cross but on a blanket, covered in metastases and disfigured by cancer. It’s not that her painful death engendered a crisis of faith in me. I had it all along since I entered adulthood. I had given up already on His Church by the time I finished University and then at a later point I gave up on the inerrancy of His Scriptures. My apostasy was bound to happen sooner or later. Her death just broke the last shackle of faith and pushed me to admit I no longer believed in God. In losing her, I lost, in one go, not one but two pillars of my existence. One death, two coffins.

In some ways losing my faith should give me a wicked sense of satisfaction. One thing that shocked me after she died was just how well we are equipped to move on and adjust to someone’s disappearance. Thousands of years of evolution installed in me a coping mechanism stronger than my pain. I didn’t go out on the streets howling like a lunatic. I didn’t tear off my clothes out of despair like our ancient ancestors. I didn’t stop eating, sleeping, laughing, fucking, breathing. I bottled up my grief. I was devastated but I was functional. The fact that we can carry on is a disgrace to me. The fact that we survive and get to keep our sanity over the death of our loved ones sickens me. So, even though her death was not the source of my crisis of faith at least she managed to shake off the last vestiges of belief in me. That counts for something.

Mourning two deaths instead of one might make things harder. I have no idea. It’s not like I had to deal with death in the past too much so I’m no expert in what level of bereavement is considered normal and sane. But what surely makes things worse is the way in which the two deaths are connected. His death puts her death in a different perspective. His death makes her death definitive and real. If you believe in God, death is an illusion. If you don’t everything else but death is an illusion. Death is the only reality we have. The crutch of hope vanished and so the despair that comes with it is unbearable.

I am told that I would end up in an asylum if I keep going on like this, if I won’t put a lid on my grief. Huh. This is what they call pain and mourning over someone? Where they see too much grief I don’t see enough of it. Where they see lingering pain I see oblivion taking over. Where they see dwelling on loss I see a healing process I cannot defeat. And why is healing and letting go healthy? Why would I want to heal at the cost of losing what I have left of her? I know I am not an ordinary guy in many respects, but is the gaping chasm between me and them that huge?

Dying and death are two different things. If death in itself doesn’t shake your belief in a benevolent God, the gratuitous spectacle of degradation and pain when someone is dying should do the trick. How someone’s faith can survive witnessing that grotesque spectacle is beyond me. Hoping against hope will never cease to amaze me.

Hell is not being able to protect someone you love. There’s nothing worse in this life than that sense of helplessness. Not even rape, injustice, betrayal or physical pain. Parents who outlive their children, unable to save them and going through that hell of powerlessness are for me proofs that God does not exist or if he does, he is just a cruel invisible Overlord not a Heavenly Father.

In the first months after she died missing her was somehow underwhelming. How can you properly miss someone when your mind is so consumed with them? How can you properly grieve over someone whose presence is still felt so strong? You do it but it’s subpar and curbed by that sense of presence. It takes time for them to fade away, it takes time for you to accept their departure and fully realize what death entails. It takes time to really, really miss them. In some ways, for me, only now the mourning begins. Only now her absence is overwhelming and I miss her like mad.

This year I didn’t put up a Christmas tree or any winter decorations. I am in no celebratory mood. Not because of the pandemic for that was a blessing in disguise for the most part. But because the desolation of last Christmas is still fresh in my mind. She loved to sit by the Christmas tree, on the red socks and stare at it. Last year, the least festive season ever, I did it for her sake though. I knew it would be her last Christmas tree. She would look at the Christmas lights, blinking on and off, from her deathbed. The reflection of those flickering lights in her big sad eyes will haunt my future Christmases forever.