death and how to live through it

death is so abritrary.

when people asked me about my parents, i reply: they are dead.

person: oh god, oh god, i'm sorry, i'm truly sorry.

me: you should be, they would never have died if it werent for you.

hahahahaha....i mean, it's an awkward strange thing to say????????????

i mentioned it to my dad's sister, who's a GP, when she wz over visiting my mum in hospital, abt three weeks ago, and to my surprise she'd completely forgotten about it: it always seemed to me the classic granny story, so decisive and exact

anyway, none of us were sad especially that she'd died, even dad, who totally adored her: she wz definitely fed up she'd lived so long, and seemed pleased to be going

same with my grandma. my other is also suffering. she has diebetes and back problems.

big human being that makes me, eh?

and now i feel indifferent to everybody else's death because i can't picture a connection between myself and them. i get egotistical and think to myself "well, come on, she was your grandma - seventies? eighties? nineties? whatever her age it was more than thirty-six. she lived a full life." it's not the same as losing your wife five fucking weeks after they diagnosed cancer, in my head i can't compare it.

it's pointless wondering why no one understands because it's 15 months later now and I still can't understand it, never mind anyone else.

anyway, my best wishes to you and yours, whoever he may be and whatever it is that you're having to endure at the moment. hope both of you get through the whole thing.

all the best, mc

Firstly, there is the fact that I am hundreds of thousands of miles away from any of my family and an event like this makes me feel very powerless and distant. I don't know that I will ever be good at receiving bad news like this over a long distance and I worry about not having more proximity to my family. Then there is the alarming rate at which my immediate family have all disappeared, either through strange illnesses and/or at relatively young ages. Two of my grandparents died in their 60s and I had none left by the time I left university. I now only have my parents and brother, two aunts, an uncle, and a couple of cousins. Which is a lot more than some people have , I know! But I had a big family when I was growing up and it's a very different story now.

The other thing I guess is that my uncle was someone who lived for today, spent a lot of money, never saved, and liked to eat and drink well. He lived some sort of oddball English country lifestyle, going to Ascot and living in a large house in Surrey (Agatha Christie's old home), and never paying much attention to his finances or his health or anyone except himself. Now he has left his wife and daughters with a mortgage they can't pay, a ton of debt, and assured them that my dad (his brother) would take care of them. Which as it happens, he can't. Not financially, anyway. I have never seen a better argument for foresight in my entire life. My parents have always been "save up for a rainy day" types whereas I have been...well, if you know anything about me, quite the opposite. And while I'm not suggesting that I'm going to sort out a downpayment and buy a life insurance policy and some mutual funds tomorrow or anything, I can't help but feel shocked into some kind of action by these events. I've had some health problems of my own recently and have resisted the urge to take them too seriously, but when I hear about an ambulance crew coming to give my uncle oxygen, and then leaving him saying he would be fine but he should check in with a doctor the next day (there was nothing specifically wrong with him), it does kind of freak me out. Twenty minutes later he just quietly died. Compounding all this is the fact that this is the first person in my family of the generation above mine, my parents' generation, to die. I simply do not feel prepared for stuff like this to start happening yet. I had just expected to see him when I came back to visit this September. And now it turns out that the night I went to a Thai restaurant with him in Guildford, where he explained that he could not come to my wedding and expressed such disbelief that I had just bought a one-way ticket to the US, was the last time I would ever speak to him.

You can't predict when 'the last time' will be for anyone. The last time I saw my grandfather on my dad's side was him waving to me from a car while I went to an arcade and he went home on the plane, when I was 13. Ever since then my parents have expressed a lot of regret that I never got the chance to know him and his wit as an adult, and now I can only look back and wonder what might have been.

But a few things have led me to the same conclusions you may be coming to: my mother and, by extension, my sister and I, only got by because my father, who we thought was so cheap-ass when he was alive, provided for us so well. Now when I look at my wife's family, who can't bother to get health insurance, have no life insurance, and are now getting old and won't stop smoking despite one of them being basically on his death bed with lung disease, I freak out. I never want to leave my children in a position of wondering how they will survive without me. Anyway, cliche though it is, it does make you think.

the same thing happened at my dad's funeral, a sick old friend of my nan's, who i always hated, said "i thought i would've been the first to go". and i thought (but didn't say) "i wish you had". but people don't know what to say at funerals, so i didn't take too much offence at it.

I don't know how to handle people's reactions to death any more than I know how to handle death itself. People have been offering me sympathy for my grandmother's death on Monday, and I don't know what to say back, which is fair enough, because they probably don't know what to say in the first place. (I'm not looking for condolences, BTW, they kind of embarrass me, actually, I'm just trying to make sense of my own emotions.)

I feel kind of sandblasted at the moment. I've been experiencing so MUCH grief for the past few months, you think you would get to a point where you can't feel any more, and maybe you'd just go numb.

I don't feel numb, but my grief seems just not at all in proportion in relation to what has happened. I have a lot of conflicting emotions. Guilt because maybe I should be feeling more *grief*, instead of just feeling sorry for myself. I don't feel grief in the usual sense, because, honestly, my grandmother and I barely knew each other. But I think that's what I'm grieving - the sense of loss of *never* having had a family. I am grieving *not* having a connection. And that's selfish. But it's mixed in with anger at old family crap - why should I feel grief for someone who abandonned their own family? How can you miss someone who was never there to start with? I feel family as an absence, not a presence. I don't know. It's complex.

Her memorial service is tomorrow, in South Africa. The family is too far flung around the world to really assemble for it. I feel like I have to explain why I'm making no effort to go. I didn't make an effort when my other grandparents died. I kind of went into myself, and ignored everyone (which pissed them all off, because they were chasing after me with the usual monetary squabbles and needing my signature to access certain trusts and things, but then they went back to ignoring me as usual). Funerals are for the living, not for the dead. I went to the British Museum and sat and thought about her, because I didn't know what else to do. That's the closest thing an atheist scientist would recognise as a cathedral, that was my logic.

This is just weird. I feel weird not talking about it, but I feel weirder talking about it.

Regarding the first post of this thread, my grandmother's boyfriend died a couple of years ago. He was a curmudgeonly old shit [just like his obnoxious ice-queen bloody girlfriend], so I was glad to see the back of him. I almost felt guilty for about half a second.

x-post

its awkward on both ends, yes. expect to hear some amazingly comforting, upsetting, helpful and downright bizarre things from people who care about you over the next couple of weeks. they're almost as shook up as you are - i always think the best approach is to take the comfort in whatever spirit it was offered, no matter how cold it might be.

and read this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1862075603/ref=pd_sr_ec_ir_b/202-7034505-2871804

i found it inspiring and very helpful... x

And to both you and Colette... with actual *friends* it doesn't really matter what they say, anything is alright, no matter how awkward or strange - I get that they care about me and care about the things that affect me. The words are meaningless, it's just the "I care" and I'm really really grateful for that.

I dunno, maybe that's true of the other people, too. I guess it's just that death really throws it into sharp relief how utterly disconnected my family are. And in a way, that actually hurts more than the death itself.

I was thinking about my Grandfather - he died before I was even born, and in a lot of ways, I think that really freed my grandmother to have the career and the exciting life that she did. But then I thought about how my grandmother used to joke - when she was forced to retire from the University (at 75) she got to bored that she went back as a student to do her PhD, and she joked "It's so I'll have a doctorate, too, when I see (your grandfather) in heaven." That just makes me bawl right now.

actually, will stick mine in the post to you, if you like. a little dog-eared but the sentiment's the same!