NotSoThoreau

I’m going to try and write some thoughts up about death. I don’t want this to become the grief and death blog, but there’s not a lot of homesteading going on right now.

So basically, when you lose your spouse, there is that life you had together. Then there is the death and there is now. The death is like a barrier between you and that life. The thickness of that barrier depends on how long you fought death. If your spouse went quickly, as in an accident, the barrier is like a plate of glass. If it was a long fight, the barrier is thicker, like glass bricks. There are true warriors out in the world, that fought death for months, trying to win the battle. If death wins, they are terribly wounded by the battle. You can’t imagine some of the stories I’ve read on the grief lists.

There’s a book by Ianthe Brautigan, about her father’s suicide. It’s called “You Can’t Catch Death”. It was something her mother told her, meaning that death is not contagious. But it feels like it is. You didn’t die, but everything about your life did. The relationship is dead. The future is dead. You are in a strange limbo, weighted down with grief. If you are trying to comfort someone that has lost a spouse, this is why they may seem strange to you. Until it happens to you, you simply can’t imagine how awful the reality is. You get frozen in time, trapped down by grief. You can prepare a bit for certain days that you know will be bad. But it is the little routine things that stab you.

So here you are, with no life ahead of you and nothing but memories behind you. Between you and the memories is the death. You’ve fought with death and lost. You’ve been wounded. You can’t live in the past. It’s pleasant and you would certainly rather spend time with those memories than with the nothing that is your current life. It’s your grief and you will have to find your own way through it. Sometimes, you just run away from it. What you need is distance from the death. Time will do that, as will new memories. To move forward, you have to build that new life. That too takes time. You can throw new memories at it and put a little distance between yourself and the death. But it’s the best that you can do. I don’t have any answers for you here. It’s just the way life is right now.