The Absurdity of Death
The personal world-shifting effects of a loved one’s death are impossible to foresee in any real way. You predict sadness, you predict hopelessness, you predict feeling lost in your loss. But you don’t predict, or even abstractly understand, how absolutely sideways everything feels for weeks or months following. How the world becomes, more than anything, a maze of funhouse mirrors you keep trying to get through and that keeps insisting on spitting you back out at the beginning.
The absurdity begins early, bending your brain to fit an upcoming reality you don’t yet see. It starts by asking you to spoon yogurt into your dying mother’s mouth, using the spoon to clean her bottom lip the same way you did with your baby daughter. It starts with you calling the fancy hotel before your arrival for a weekend trip to the city with your best friend to make sure they remembered to give you a minifridge in your room, not because you need to chill your beer but because he needs infusions regularly for his cancer treatments and they must be refrigerated.
These early moments of mental plasticity — these moments of reshaping relationships, accepting and adapting to new truths, finding wells you didn’t know you’d need or would have — if you meet these, they will save you. They are your first swims in unfamiliar waters, and they build your muscles, develop your backstroke, strengthen your lungs. If you avoid them, you avoid knowing you can do the next swim. You’ll skirt the water or take the long way around, and when a bridge drops out beneath you, you’ll find you cannot swim.
The days after my mother’s death, I was bleary eyed and exhausted. I question, today, whether some of it was real. Did I really see twin spotted fawns on my way home from her August deathbed? Or did I hallucinate those in a state of no sleep? It doesn’t matter, really. I remember those fawns, and I remember being comforted by those fawns, so whether real, hallucinated, or dreamt, they’re real enough to hold on to.
Some things aren’t real enough to matter and those, too, become stark in the aftermath. The pressure to maintain relationships because it’s what’s expected slowly but surely evaporates, leaving only people you love and people you don’t. And who you don’t love? That becomes clearer, too.
A month or so after my mother died, my daughter came home from school with lice. I don’t remember doing so, but I’m 100% certain I picked up the phone to call my mother to ask her to come help. When I couldn’t do that, I buckled my kid in her car seat and drove to town for the lice shampoo that comes with the special comb. This feels like enough of an indignity for being a month without a mother, but on the way there, an eerie quiet and an eerier smell began to creep forward from the backseat. When I looked behind me, the carseat, window, and child were covered in throwup. Knowing I couldn’t enter a store with her in that state and, Millennial mom that I am, knowing I couldn’t leave her in the car while I ran in, I turned around and headed back home to bathe her and clean the car.
As I fumbled with the front door knob, keys in one hand, puke-slicked child’s hand in my other (it was warm and gross and I didn’t even care because I didn’t care about anything), I dropped the keys and broke down in heavy, wracking sobs and finally, for the first time in weeks, cried “I want to talk to my mom.” It was the truest thing I had said in months.
A few more weeks later (lice successfully dispatched), we were on our way to a soccer game, swimming along with music on, windows open, my hand reached behind me into the back seat to squeeze my daughter’s little foot while I drive, when I pointed out a murmuration of starlings swooping and turning in the fields on either side of us.
“Look, Elle!” I said. “Look how they all fly together.”
They arced up in unison, banking left and crossing the road above us as we drove under. Just then, the flock took a hard sweep right, turning in unison and with such force that they all shit at once. My car was pelted with bird shit, hitting it so hard it sounded like a bushel of grapes had been dumped on us from high above. The moonroof was open, and little purple polka dots of bird shit dotted everything from the hood to the back seat and I just… lost it. I released. I laughed. I laughed so hard I wheezed and tears rolled down my cheeks. I laughed so hard I had to pull over because I couldn’t see through my smile-shut eyes. I laughed so hard it broke into sobs at times and I had to reassure my daughter that I was okay. But I laughed.
Both of those things — that puke-slicked hand that broke me and that shit-covered car that brought me back — both of those felt like my mom. I don’t believe they were my mom, but they felt like her. They felt like bumpers in a bowling lane of grief. Things to knock into, hard, and that would push me back in another direction. That metaphor feels sloppy, but fuck, so does grieving. It feels like all the clichés, all the overwrought writing, all the sappy movie scenes. And it also feels like not caring about any of those things. Whatever helps you, you grab it. Whatever floats, you float with it. Your world necessarily contracts into the important and the helpful, and the extra stuff — the unimportant, the unhelpful — is pushed out of your orbit from the force of this loss at the center. It’s a density that doesn’t allow for frivolousness.
