‘Stating the Obvious’ alert. Obviously it’s a challenge to keep my posts regular. This blogging business is harder than I thought. But that’s obviously true for much of life, you just don’t know until you know. And you can’t know until you try. So I’m going to give this another try.
You can never be prepared for when a loved one passes. Fact. It falls into that category of experiences you just can’t know until you know, like loosing your virginity or childbirth. I had almost fifteen years to prepare for my mother’s death. But the inevitable is the last thing I wanted to think about, even towards the end when her health was more and more compromised and she was gently nudging us to prepare. Perversely, I found myself wishing I’d had more ‘grief experience’.
In the natural order of things, parents predecease their children which allows us to experience the death of our grandparents before that of our parents. I remembered kids I grew up with who had a grandparent die. I coveted their advanced experience in this dark arena. Not that I wished for the death of the one and only grandparent I knew, but I mused on playing with timelines: what if the grands I never knew died later, say when I was a kid instead of when my parents were kids. Of course enough time line altering stories out there warn that the chain reaction of events would have altered who my parents would have become and maybe they wouldn’t have met and then I wouldn’t even exist to have this twisted little moment of musing. Still, I was distracted with morbid details – I worried that my mother would be the first dead body I would see. It freaked the shit out of me; how would I prepare for that?
Sometime in the middle of my mother’s illness an older friend of the family passed. Here it was, my chance to see someone I had known as a vibrant, sentient being reduced to a cold, still corpse. I had to work the day of the funeral and missed the viewing of the body. ‘What? Why was the Universe working against me?’ What about all my plans and preparations?
“Oh what fools we mortals be.” ~ Will S.
Seriously, if no one could have been a stand-in for her in life, how could that crazy logic ever make sense? You can’t prepare emotions. You can’t prepare for the when or the how. There are no dress rehearsals for death. It’s just going to happen. Knowing that, is the only preparation there is.
It may be cliché to say, but just be present in the moments of grief. They will come and go. They will not pass. That is what you have to prepare for… the ‘afterword’ of life without this very important person. There will be a permanent void in that relationship. But you will keep on. One step at a time. Deep breaths and baby steps.
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