Thoughts-dump about death
It’s Sunday, I’m sitting in bed and I’m thinking about death. Every so often I get hit, and I mean hit, with grief so deep that it feels like I can’t inhale enough oxygen with every breath. How is it that my life has just moved on? Time has relentlessly tossed me through love and pain and grief and laughter and guttural sobs and just when I think I’ve come up for air long enough to breathe properly, I’m drug underwater again.
A lot of the time, everything feels mundane. Like I’m stuck between two distinct phases of life. Today it feels like life is running at one hundred miles per hour and I’ve just realized that I’ve been running for awhile and I’m exhausted. How long have I been running like this? I don’t even remember what I was like before loss. Did I worry this much? Were my intrusive thoughts this dark? Did I smile differently? Were my emotions this intense?
I love a lot of dead people. That’s the thought that knocked the wind out of me this morning. I love them deeply and they’re dead and they don’t feel it anymore. I think about them all the time. I miss them all the time and they probably have no idea. Why’d my life get to unfold further without them in it? Fuck, Sam was seventeen years old. My grandma died from a surgery she didn’t even need. Her heart gave up before it had to. Sometimes it feels like my heart is giving up, too. I don’t want to die, but I wish I could be wherever she is. I can still feel her warmth. I can still smell her hair. She was a foot and a half shorter than me, and when we hugged, I would bury my nose in her hair and inhale. Perhaps that was the last time I really breathed.
Grief has a funny way of making me talk to myself. I used to have Sam’s obituary hung on my kitchen wall. I would glance over at him while I cooked. I would ask him where he is and if he’s happy and if it hurts to die and if he knows we still talk about him. I have my grandma’s handwriting tattooed on my arm. I think back to the first time I read her “I love you now and always” signature and how trivial it seemed at the time, but now it’s part of my body. How many “I love you’s” did I hear and forget to engrave into my memories? Why didn’t I love them this hard when they were here? I guess I did. But I obsess over the hours I spent not calling them just to say it. I obsess over the minutes I could’ve spent lingering in their doorways, having one more conversation before I go, taking in the presence of their beating hearts.
I was laying on my grandma’s chest when hers stopped beating. She was scared and I was sobbing and it wasn’t a beautiful ending. She was in the room the day I was brought into this world, and I wonder if she felt the same intensity as I felt in the room the day she left it. Sam died alone in a car. I wonder if he was scared. I wish I could’ve held him, too. I wish I could tell him it was so cold and dark one night that you could almost see the northern lights from the end of the dock and he would have loved to have seen it. Maybe he did. I want to tell my grandma that I’m writing again. She tried convincing me for years to tell my stories, but I didn’t feel inspired until loss opened up a hole where my feelings now pour from. I don’t remember feeling much growing up, but now it’s all I ever do.
Grief has changed me in many ways. It has made me more cynical. It’s made me funnier, actually. It’s made me love differently … it’s made me love better. I don’t know if heaven is real, but I think wherever my dead relatives are, they’re loving me back through the intense emotions that now constantly explode inside my body.
