Jacob Bernstein wrote a Sunday NYT piece about his mom's death - Nora Ephron's Final Act - that's part memoir, part writing primer, and I have been mulling over it for a few days now. There's a lot of material to work with in the piece, but the part I can't seem to get out of my head is where he talks about his mom's search for a good death.
A good death. I'm not sure I believe that's possible. Maybe, maybe, approaching 100, at home in your own bed, from one sleep to the next. When you're ready to go. As if most of us are ever ready, even at 100, with everything failing and many of those we love gone before us.
I haven't known many good deaths. The deaths I've known have been the rage-against-the-dying-of-the-light kind, the gone-too-soon kind, ugly ravages of disease or caskets too small, mourners too young. Months or moments coming, it doesn't matter.
When I worked in the business of dying, I always counseled people to comfort the bereaved with a simple "I'm sorry." It's all you can say, really. Everything else is platitude, some of it benign, a lot of it borderline offensive.
My favorites were always "she's in a better place," or "it'll get easier with time." I'm a person of faith. I believe there's more to who we are and what we are than just the organic material we inhabit. But the first time someone said the former to me I almost leveled them. If there's a better place, I'd suggest you go find it, and get the hell out of my face.
You get the drift.
It's the latter that always leaves me wondering if the person who says it has ever lost anyone at all. It doesn't get easier. Never, ever.
When my mom lost a kidney to cancer, the doctors assured her she would be fine, and she was. The other kidney picked up the slack, and she's healthy, doing great. But she's still missing a kidney.
Grief is like a phantom limb. You're missing something. It's gone, it's never come back and after a period of time you adjust to that absence, find ways to work around what you're lacking. But every so often, sometimes more often than not, you feel a twitching, an itch, you reach for something and realize in the reaching that you are grabbing with an arm that is no longer there. And it hits you all over again, as powerful as the day you first lost it, the magnitude of what you lost and how your life will never be the same.
Good again, absolutely. You can choose to adapt to your new specs, have a normal life but it will always, always be different.
There is an Edna St. Vincent Millay quote that I stumbled across in late October, 2001 that I have carried with me scrawled on the back of a fading photograph ever since. "Where you used to be," she wrote, "there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell."
That is grief. It does not leave you, it walks beside you. Even when it's but a shadow, it is still there, in the corner. It waits. And you learn to try to anticipate the times it decides to stand and stretch and reach, but it still surprises.
You move forward, not on. You keep moving because the alternative is to lie down and become part of the loss yourself. But you don't get over it.
I wish people would stop saying you should.
