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On Death and Loss

Someone lost someone today. A lot of people I care about have lost someone they love recently. You’d think I might know how to make them feel better by now. You think I’d know how to make myself feel better. It doesn’t work like that. Death and loss are woeful foes.

Death

Death. Ice cold, final death. When it steals our children, parents, lovers and friends it smacks our head – Hard. So hard that it evokes a uniquely numb, stinging pain that is deaf and blind to any form of comfort that we’d be able to see or hear clearly at any other time.

Darl to Doll

Our heart, ears and senses go to the morgue – to that place of freezing where our body and emotions seem to stop. We become a doll – A cheap, plastic, mass-produced sort. Our body does what it must, and no more. We slip and shatter again, and again, then again. It disturbs the helpless people around us, all this shattering – And yet the breaking doesn’t hurt anywhere near as much as the other times – Those intermittent snatches of time when we interact with the world as the hollowed-out puppet dolls we have become.

Defy/Die

It defies logic. The human body, like any other, wasn’t designed to last forever. Dying is a universal, natural act. Our love and respect for all things organic really hit a brick wall when it comes to our losses. Why? It doesn’t make sense. We mostly experience loss the same as everyone else does, yet this doesn’t make us any better at managing our own grief, nor at easing the pain when others take their turn.

Before Time

Death is weird. It doesn’t seem natural, it feels tragic. Grief strips us to the bone, exposes us for all the world to see. We go into it composed, and if we come out of it at all, we are never quite the same. We go into it whole and get spat out ……processed. Transformed, in a way, from someone we once knew into a kind of oatmeal porridge that just doesn’t match our lipstick anymore. A strange person, suddenly formless and void – Like the stuff that existed way, way back – in that time that was before time itself began.

Fix it?

This post is nebulous because I am processing stuff. You know all about that unless you are Artificial Intelligence, of course. While coping with death and loss is not an option for me right now, I have to feed the dog, call the children and maintain the nuts and bolts that keep life ticking. It’s as hard as it is pointless.

Crutches (Mobility Sort)

We all have them. If I get to the point where I have something to say, I do intend completing this post in time. My stabilisers are:

Reading

I am reading a book, Rantology while fighting the urge not to overthink my current over-feeling. It’s a broad spectrum, deeply personal book about the simplicity and complexity of everything about existing. Check out the link if you are interested.

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