Opinion
And it comes strangely over me in bidding you goodbye how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note. It is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary goodnight. — William James
Philosopher and psychologist William James’ final letters to friends toward the end of his life mirrored his duality with existence and the unknown — his “resented bereavement” of death.
James struggled with the concept of loss, and as his friends and family left this earth, he spent years contemplating the vast chambers of the human heart.
Loss hijacks our logic, our coming to terms that certain things are over, and makes us reticent about our reality. We recognize we are tumbling through our own timeline and that death along the way marks our journey.
Distanced loss — loss experienced as a third party observer — manifests as an avascular sorrow, an unoxygenated vessel, sorrow removed from the object of pity. We must learn to navigate this earthly plane in their absence and witness loss vicariously through another.
For Elizabeth, it was a relentless, slow unplugging and painless in the end. My stepmother sank into a void and never woke. For my father, the days languished as though he were slowly suffocating.
His posture changed, a forward tilt away from the midline, a closing of the body. He sat at the kitchen table and cried, moving to his chair in the living room, then finally supine on the couch where he dozed.
And I could do nothing except sit with him and awaken fond memories of her time here. Occasionally we laughed together, and it changed the emotion briefly.
The dance to the end began as it always will, at everyday moments, on beautiful, sunlit days, on a boat on a lake, having dinner with friends, or in a car on the way to a square dance.
Sometimes that end is absolute and efficient as a bolt of lightning on a sunny beach. Nature cuts us down. Other times, it is a painful meandering through a forest of unexplainable anomalies, a waiting that becomes unbearable because we don’t know the ending and we barely grasped the beginning.
In a car on the way to a square dance.
My father and Elizabeth, on a Saturday night, en route to a dance only twenty-five miles from their home.
The journey from their mountain home in rural North Georgia to the dance hall was something they did nearly every weekend. It was something they did for much of their forty years together.
Both in their eighties, they’d attend the square dance, socialize, then make the drive back to their home. By then it would be 1:00 AM, but retiring to bed after hours of physical activity was moot. A glass of bourbon first, some discussion about the dance — who messed up a step or two, all lovable jesting.
I visited my father and stepmother often. Years before, I’d retire at 10:00 PM and hear them come home around one. How could they have that much zest? That much boundless energy for life, I thought then. Twenty years younger, I questioned my nocturnal habits. Then I recalled I was a parent to a five-year-old.
That Saturday night, they never made it to dance. Elizabeth experienced a sudden headache — intense pain that I would later learn was blood slowly pooling along the cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, in a lobar hemorrhage.
After a second and third brain bleed in the coming days, I hid my knowledge — suspending disbelief — of such dire medical episodes from my father and family members. While they insisted she would eventually return home, I knew she never would.
It was a balmy end to a Georgia July evening, and insects hovered in disoriented frenzies over the modern LED hospital lights suspended over the highway that runs north and dead ends into the mountains of north Georgia, then south to Atlanta.
The lights short-circuited the insect’s innate navigational system, causing them to zig-zag or stall.
The insects lost their way through the charcoal night because of the deceiving artificial lights. As though hypnotized, they remained suspended over the heat, unable to find the original path in the night. They perished from confusion and exhaustion, their frail abdomens dotting the cement under the sign like pieces of rice.
Unlike the insect’s misguided path, my father had found the hospital off the dark, winding roads because of the starkly lit signage, but in the end, like the insects, it didn’t matter.
The unplugging had already begun perhaps years before. There were bicycle spills along mountain paths and careless, unbalanced mishaps resulting in several bumps to her head.
With my father’s loss, I share James’ feelings of helplessness. He tried to equalize the weight of his grief by superimposing it with obsession — vast remembrances of physical being. A last kiss, an embrace, holding hands. And, like James, I succored the optimism of her eventual healing because that small offering brought a temporary reprieve from the misery.
What gnawed at James — and what gnaws at us all — is the finality of life. Life is death, yin and yang. Here now, gone in an instant. Souls plucked from everyday instances, from common moments, to what? We feel, as James wrote, a “resented bereavement.”
Perhaps what troubles us most is the reliably adroit semblance of our mortality. James understood this notion, that a loved one’s passing rips open our guts to musings about our own impending doom. It reminds us that it’s right there across a beveled landscape. And it puzzles us that our egos do not power the ship.
As James eventually realized, our very existence is a gift. In the depths of our loss, we must celebrate life and reflect upon how those we’ve walked with empowered our own experience here.
And that is enough.
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