Imploding
[ Count me in on the LJ resurgence! Unfortunately, I'll be on vacation for the next 3 weeks. But to tide me over, here's a barely-proofread draft that I've been meaning to publish for months ]
I read Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture a few years back, when I was grappling with the death of a family member.
Before she died, I was a hopeful agnostic: I didn't think a greater being existed, but I yearned for the comfort of such a knowledge. But it was in the rubble of her death that I knew that I was lying to myself: I was an atheist. My parents retreated into religion: my mother into comfort, and my father into recriminations (ie, "why would a loving god allow her to die?"). For me, all I felt was an emptiness: an in-the-bones ache that whispered "I will never see her again." And so I became an atheist; not out of reason, sense, or logic, but because I could not feel, much less imagine, a world in which I would ever see her again. Not in dreams, not in the afterlife, not in this life or the next.
In this mindset, I picked up two books: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and The Last Lecture. Both of them didn't speak to me: Didion's is a bit too weird, a bit too frenetic to feel "right", and Pausch's too hopeful. But both of them have clung to me and gave me comfort.
Here's Pausch's:
Randy was moved by comments such as the one he received from a man with serious heart problems. The man wrote to tell Randy about Krishnamurti, a spiritual leader in India who died in 1986. Krishnamurti was once asked what was the most appropriate way to say goodbye to a man who was about to die. He answered: "Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone." In his email to Randy, this man was reassuring: "I know you are not alone.
Given the tone of the rest of the book, I think the quote was meant to be inspirational. But for me, it helped me come to grips with the physical and psychological sensations in the months after her death. I clearly remember moments when I, in panic, needed to hunch my shoulders: if I didn't physically protect myself from the emptiness in my chest I would implode, like a science-fiction character in whom a black hole has been implanted.
I read Randy Pausch's The Last Lecture a few years back, when I was grappling with the death of a family member.
Before she died, I was a hopeful agnostic: I didn't think a greater being existed, but I yearned for the comfort of such a knowledge. But it was in the rubble of her death that I knew that I was lying to myself: I was an atheist. My parents retreated into religion: my mother into comfort, and my father into recriminations (ie, "why would a loving god allow her to die?"). For me, all I felt was an emptiness: an in-the-bones ache that whispered "I will never see her again." And so I became an atheist; not out of reason, sense, or logic, but because I could not feel, much less imagine, a world in which I would ever see her again. Not in dreams, not in the afterlife, not in this life or the next.
In this mindset, I picked up two books: Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and The Last Lecture. Both of them didn't speak to me: Didion's is a bit too weird, a bit too frenetic to feel "right", and Pausch's too hopeful. But both of them have clung to me and gave me comfort.
Here's Pausch's:
Randy was moved by comments such as the one he received from a man with serious heart problems. The man wrote to tell Randy about Krishnamurti, a spiritual leader in India who died in 1986. Krishnamurti was once asked what was the most appropriate way to say goodbye to a man who was about to die. He answered: "Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone." In his email to Randy, this man was reassuring: "I know you are not alone.
Given the tone of the rest of the book, I think the quote was meant to be inspirational. But for me, it helped me come to grips with the physical and psychological sensations in the months after her death. I clearly remember moments when I, in panic, needed to hunch my shoulders: if I didn't physically protect myself from the emptiness in my chest I would implode, like a science-fiction character in whom a black hole has been implanted.