Death

The Myth Slayer – aka “me”


Jan van Eyck, "Knights of Christ" (d...

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Stumbled across a book on “closure” not long ago, written by Nancy Berns, a professor at Drake University in my old home of Des Moines, Iowa. She’s a sociologist, attracted to the cherry “death and dying” course work. I have perused her blog but only read the first chapter of her book because it’s essentially a textbook for one of her courses and, therefore, ungodly expensive.*

In Chapter one, Berns basically outlines the progression of the rest of the book in syllabus fashion with brief detours into the history of the etymology, psychology,  cultural and historical evolution of a term that she compares to the equally made up idea of “self-esteem”. It is not, exactly, a grief book. Although since nearly everything in our culture is now subject to the Kübler-Rossification of processing, it is heavy on the idea that humans need to define the death throes of all experiences. Nothing can simply end. It has to be analyzed, processed and brought to “closure”.

The case can be made that because people believe in the idea that all things unsettling, hurtful and traumatic need to be kneaded like dough, punched into submission and baked until closure, it must be real. Of course, Santa Claus is real until you reach a certain age of enlightenment about magic, and God is real until it becomes apparent that he is like Santa Claus and perhaps existence can’t be explained so simplistically.

Toward the end of Chapter One, Berns describes the two types of people who don’t believe in closure – The Walking Wounded, who can’t find it and the Myth Slayers, who simply can’t fathom its existence.

I like the term Myth Slayer, don’t you? It’s fitting. I don’t believe in grief as a process (unless you are willing to admit that life itself is a series of processes of which grief is just one and in that case I will concede). I am suspicious of the idea that everything needs to be analyzed in light of how we feel about it because feelings are often irrelevant. Some things just are. Birth and death are merely the beginning and end points of mortal existence and are viewed through the accepted societal narratives of the culture and times, which vary depending on where in the world Carmen SanDiego happens to be at any given moment.

One of the reasons I rail against the grief process whose end goal is closure so that people can move on, is that I think it sets up false expectations, hopes and even inspires fear and feelings of inadequacy in those who buy in only to discover that what is promised isn’t going to materialize. It’s not okay to sell grief á la Weight Watchers or peddle it as a life-long chronic emotional illness. Grief culture is just a mythology that our death fearing, but equally obsessed with, society has created to explain the seemingly unexplainable. Just like the Greeks and the Norse invented the gods and goddesses to explain and teach, we have the five stages of grief and closure to weave through the narrative of life’s rather ordinary processes. In this way, we can avoid the fact that life is full of beginnings, middles and endings where just about everything is concerned and we can avoid the reality that nothing much happens on any front without effort on our part. There is no magic.

No magic. It’s a letdown day when we first realize this as children and it continues to bum us out until someone has to bury us and search for closure of his or her own.

One thing that resonated was Bern’s belief that people don’t need closure to heal**, which runs contrary to what the grief industry would like us to believe. Unsurprisingly, I agree with this premise. The falsehood of promoting this has led many a person to sit back, wallow and wait instead of putting one foot in front of the other and moving on. Grief lessens until it reaches a point where it is so muted as to not really be grief as it is portrayed today. There is lingering regret, longing, and sadness attached to nearly anything that ended without our permission. Death is not special in that respect. Closure promotes clinging and this leads to wallowing, sympathy seeking and inertia in terms of moving on. It gives people permission to define themselves in terms of what life has done to them instead of defining themselves by what they do in life. Bonanno would say that this is tied to resiliency, which some of us have in abundance and others of us lack or don’t have the inner resources to access or use if we did. Some social Darwinism in play here too, I suspect.

Closure is hardly a grief thing. We are encouraged to look for it when we lose jobs, lovers, friends and when bad things happen to us good people. We are a 12-step culture and I blame the Baby Boomers, but I blame them for most things about society that drip with self-absorption and keen like a child denied.

Everyone should don a cape, pick up a bludgeon and play “whack a mole” with cultural foolishness now and again.  It’s liberating to discard made up notions superimposed on normal feelings and milestones.

*At $75 for a hardback and $25 for paper, I won’t be purchasing it anytime soon. College students, it seems, are still viewed as a cash cow captive audience. In the age of e-readers and smart-phones, it astounds me that they haven’t risen up and demanded downloadable e-texts at affordable prices, but that’s a post for another day.

**However, she seems to adhere to the same idea that society pushed people through grief – as if this was actually possible – and that grief, like a fine wine, should be savored. I have to chuckle a bit because by and large people move on at a pace dictated by their personalities and needs in spite of society’s best efforts to school them.

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Little Girl Lost


Little Girl

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A friend of the older girls disappeared earlier this week setting off a fast, frantic furious search launched by concerned friends via social media and flyers plastered on buildings in an ever-widening circle.

She hadn’t shown up for work. Her car was missing but her cell phone was not.

I didn’t know her but for a handful of encounters at the house she shared for a time with Edie. She smiled but looked away or down more than she looked at you. I chalked it up to shyness or the awkwardness of your roommate’s  parents descending and upsetting the singular atmosphere of house-sharing as it exists among the young today.

Twenty  and employment challenged, she’d settled into work at a nearby youth hostel. You would have noticed her had you seen her, long wild red locks, round cheeks and ethereal in a Renaissance Fair kind of way. She was beautiful in that fleeting way that we women never appreciate about ourselves until decades later when we run across old photographs and wonder why we didn’t see it when we looked in the mirror then.

She wasn’t missing long.

And when they found her, she was already gone.

She driven to mountains. It’s a city we always pass through on our way to the Okanagan. A destination whose significance was known only to her and it’s where she died.

Edie and Mick were postering at a local park when they heard the news. Friends were already gathering for a candlelight vigil. Edie posted it to her status on Facebook, the town crier of our modern life.

Rob was still out, driving the babysitter home. We’d been out to formal work function earlier.

I greeted Rob on the back porch with the news.

“How’s Edie taking it,” he asked.

“You should call her, ” I said.

I listened as she told him the news through choked sobs and sniffles. Worry on his face mixed with the urge to do and knowledge that “listening” was all he had to offer at the moment.

Mick has lost friends to suicide. He asked if she was okay. Edie said they were together. Dare was there and Silver was on his way. They would not be alone.

She noted that this would be her third funeral this year. She still is surprised by death. It didn’t strike close until she was an adult. That lulls some people I suppose. I was eight the first time, and it doesn’t surprise me anymore. The way it can come in waves, taking without regard to age and leaves you grappling with feelings and thoughts you try to avoid most times.

Edie told Rob that she’d just seen her friend a week ago.

“I didn’t see this coming,” it was hard to tell if that was surprise or self-recrimination.

“It’s so hard to understand,” he said.

It is. In cases when there are mental health issues evident, serious mental illness, there is at least something concrete. I taught in an at-risk program at my first middle school, and one of my favorite students lost his father to suicide.  The group’s counselor and I took all his classmates to the funeral. The man had thrown himself in front of  a train. I’d met him maybe just the once. Jon lived with his mother. His dad’s mother and sisters made sure he had plenty of supportive family around, but his father’s mental illness hung over him. He was afraid he’d end up like his dad, hearing voices and trying not to listen or do what they told him too.

At the funeral, the grandmother told the counselor and I that she was glad her son was at peace. The voices, she said, had plagued him since he was a small boy. He was just too tired to ignore them anymore.

But some people’s deaths can’t be pinned to obvious causes. They hide them in plain sight secure that their game faces are just like ours, or  – perhaps – they just don’t have the strength to live in the world. It’s not really Eden after all or even property east of it. Some people just can’t imagine themselves far enough in the future to wade through the now. They tire. They slowly stop treading and go under, and we are too busy swimming ourselves to notice.

My late husband lost two friends to their own hands when he was in college. After the second, he was so distraught he thought about it himself. Loaded the shotgun even. What made him pick up the phone and call his best friend that night, he really didn’t know he said when he told me about this years later.

“If anyone knew what there was to live for, it was Wally,” he said.

He could have just as easily not called though and I would be somewhere else today. And it wasn’t as if anyone had an inkling of how he felt or what he planned to do. It was just … one of those fateful things that can’t be explained even in retrospect.

Edie’s friend left behind a mother, who’s devastation I could not bear to imagine, a boyfriend, a few extended family members and many, many friends who loved her and searched fervently for her – if only she had known, and maybe she didn’t take her phone because she couldn’t carry that knowledge with her where she needed to go.

Rest in peace, Kylen.

only what is truly important


Stanford University Quad Sky

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“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything—all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure—these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”—Steve Jobs – Stanford University Commencement Address, 2005

Jobs gave what is arguably one of the best launch speeches ever in his 2005 commencement address to Stanford University students. Filtered through his own intimate acquaintance with mortality, he boiled it down and handed it on a platter to kids who’d only ever received anything sans much struggle anyway, so it’s doubtful – given their age and relative privilege compared to most – that any of the young adults in attendance that day took Jobs’ words and ran with them. 2005 was still “booming times” with “limitless growth potential”.

And I would guess that anyone who did give his words more than a cursory second thought misapplied the advice in a material Jeffersonian “pursuit of happiness” way that is typical of Americans and those who follow the model. Following one’s heart is not about “happiness”. There are more important things that simply being “happy”.

Happy, like sad, or satiated or angry or blah or anything that a person can feel is transient. It’s like weather. Wait long enough and it will change – for better or worse.

What is truly important boils down to surprisingly little when one is willing to measure it against the finite amount of time we are alloted. Love, giving more than receiving but also not giving just to receive. Knowing our true self well enough to realize that it is the only true north compass we have. Realizing that we are ultimately more than the shells we inhabit and the stuff that supports our shells. Being thankful for everything because the universe didn’t owe us any of our experiences but gave us the opportunities anyway – to learn from or not as we chose.

Mostly though what is important is the fact that we are the authors of our lives. Dramas, romantic comedies, tragedies. We dwell in the narratives we’ve written for ourselves.