grief

I have never known life without death.

Many of my earliest memories involve our American traditions surrounding death. Rituals of patent-leather Mary Janes, pink funeral-home carpet, and the sad lonely smell of wilting roses.

Thankfully I grew up in an era and home that did not fall under the delusion that separating children from death was helpful. I talked with my mother about missing grandma while making chocolate-chip cookies. Driving in the car, Dad told me where he was when his father passed away. I accompanied my family to visitation hours and funerals of family and friends. It was as natural and expected for me to tag along to the funeral home as if we had been running errands, or to the market.

I was taught by example that death was a part of life, and that even as a person small in stature I was large enough in character to handle it. As a family, we went to weddings, ball-games, and the grave-yard. My mother and I wrapped gifts, checked out library books, and put flowers on her mother's grave. It was a part of life, the living remembering the dead.

And it was a good thing that I had been exposed to death so early, because death had been near to me from the begining. As soon as I was born I was mourning people I never knew. The shadows of my mother's mother and father's father were in my life from the beginning. I never got to share a table with them, never got to find out how they smell, never was dissappointed or frustrated by them. Just as they never got to share life with me. All I have are the conversations that I have had with my mother and father about them.

It seems death has been on my heels ever since. I watched my mother in her nightgown and tears tell me that my aunt had died. I watched my three cousins smile and pose for the camera in front of her coffin. I watched my mother's father battle and lose his life to cancer. I watched our family come together to grieve and then disperse, still healing. It has been over 12 years and I can still smell my grandpa's cologne.

Then in the throes of high-school insecurity, my best friend told me that her mother's breast cancer was back, having spread to her brain. Together, we shopped, made each other over, and tried to distract ourselves from the truth that was suffocating both of us...she was dying. Then we limped through high school missing her and wondering if it would get any easier.

It did.
I know I still miss her mom. But the grief waves come less often and I break the surface quicker than I used to.

Sometimes I wonder when death will break in again, stealing a loved one. I think that death never gets any easier. The point to mourning is to feel the loss. To understand how much we love someone I feel that we have to embrace the hole in our life when they are gone. It's when we stiffle the pain that mourning gets unhealthy. Like a physical wound we humans must let it drain, scab over, and heal. Not a pretty or painless process...and then there are the scars to deal with. Eventually the physical scars fade, maybe not completely but lessen. Grief is sort of like that.

Ugly, awkward, and slow.

Hmmm...sort of like the birth process.

But I guess I was blessed with the knowledge that I could handle all the aspects of life...because I wasn't "protected" from death, from the knowledge that everyone on earth eventually dies. And if I wasn't sheltered from it, then I guess I could handle it, huh?

I have never known life without death.