I figured out eventually that it’s not the death and dying, its the absence of the living. Absence being the key. The death and dying part are but a moment, it’s the after part that throws your world upside down and inside out. The absence of that person, once so vital to your life, becomes the new reality.
I never fully got over my obsession with seeing a dead body. Luckily my mother was not the first dead body I saw. Four years before my mom passed the family matriarch died back in the old country. I went to represent our branch of the family tree. My great aunt had been a woman of substantial girth and big energy but her body had been whittled down to wizened and waifish proportions. Death had not wrought the change, it was the process of age and illness, but looking at this face I didn’t recognize I understood a little better this concept of the body being just a shell.
When my mom died I was not in the country and so my obsession was renewed and revised. Now I needed to see the body to verify, I needed physical confirmation. It was the classic, ‘what if this is all a mistake’ denial. I wanted to delay the inevitable. My wish was cruelly granted. I had to wait to view the body because an autopsy had been ordered, apparently standard procedure. Of course I knew she was dead, as a Co-executor I had to attend to all the business of death. Eventually the body was released and I was allowed the cathartic moment of ‘saying my goodbyes’. Now it was time for the next emotional devastation – the moment after. The never ending moment of life without her. This is foreign terrain, I’ve never been here before. The landscape is unfamiliar, I’d never seen my life without her in it. There is no map and sign posts are hard to find, but it is not unnavigable.
Like a newly blind man who remembers the vibrancy of colors, I am finding my way through the new and the familiar. Life without color has a different vibrancy, the absence is permanent but little by little the senses come back to life though some hues remain permanently muted.
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