Twelve weeks. Next Thursday it will be one quarter of a year.
Death is like a crazy inversion of birth: a mockery of it. I talk about weeks the way I did after my son was born, recording every new sensation at small intervals; everything seems more important. I am more acutely sensitive in the early days and more inured to newness and sensation as the months go by.There's also the feeling that this acuteness of observation must be held on to because it won't happen again like this. Later will be too late.
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The care that people need soon after birth and as they approach death is the same: the body needs other hands, is not yet or no longer self-sufficient. The more attention you lavish on these bodies, the more you feel loved and the more love you are capable of feeling. The difference is that while such love matures and grows immense as a child grows, the moment a person dies, there is nowhere to put the love you have cultivated through the last days. Sorrow must be love’s sad face.
Just as the navel is a mark of what is lost, death must leave its own scars but on whom and where?
(Grave. Graven. Engraved. Gravestone.)
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5 comments:
I am not close to my parents. I fear of what I will feel at their deaths.
Both birth and death leave me with an unnerving sense of incompleteness. I can see the first making its journey; the second is scarier because the journeys of our loved ones are invisible to us.
Take care, Dala.
Have you read Joan Didion's book, 'The Year of Magical Thinking'?
It was written after her husband's sudden death. She speaks very movingly of, among other things, how one's perception of time changes following a bereavement. Life's starting blocks seem to have shifted- everything is seen in the new context. Do take good care of yourself -grief is most draining.And while caring for the family, give yourself the time and the space to mourn.
Off-topic, so pardon me.
I've always wanted to ask someone who's a parent (and I'm too chicken to ask my own mother): how does being a parent change your views on mortality? (And do your views on mortality affect your parenting?)
dipali: Yes. I have. with what seems to me now to be a rather macabre wish, I wanted to give my parents the book for their Anniversary.
km: that's another post. Will do.
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