On Death

Originally run on 9 September 2009 for the Opinions page.

On Death: Not a Fan
How Loss Teaches Us What We Should Already Know

Death, I’m realizing, is the worst. It tears people up inside, it ruins their days, and it’s a complete mystery. Death, like most important things, can’t be understood until you actually experience it yourself. Even for the living, there’s no amount of prep work or training that can make sense of it. I’ve come to this conclusion, because last Thursday, my uncle died.

I can make a good omelette and I can out-score my parents in a game of Jeopardy, but when it comes to something as basically important as sending my cousins a condolence e-mail, I’m entirely out of my depth. This matters like so few things do. If I can’t write more than a couple of sentences to comfort someone how am I ever going to deal when death strikes closer or harder? The things the matter most in life, I seem to be least equipped for.

The past hasn’t prepared me for this situation, because I’ve never been so close to a death like this one. When my grandparents passed, it didn’t exactly come as a shock. My grandmother on my mom’s side was the first to die, but I was so young it barely even registered. She died in her sleep and, as I learned by hearing it over and over again in the weeks after, “That’s the way to go.”

When her husband died, it wasn’t exactly a horrific shock. He went out as most people only dream of. He was 92, sharp as a tack, he had a girlfriend, he traveled the world, and wasn’t haunted by any dark secrets. He was a good man who was survived by nine children and who knows how many grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Even the manner of his death could almost be considered gentle. He didn’t contract some disease that sucked him dry and robbed him of his mind like Alzheimer’s did my dad’s mother. When he died, he pulled his car in front of his house, put it in park, and died. The engine was still running when his neighbors found him. My grandpa on my dad’s side was even less of a shock: He died years before I was even born.

It wasn’t that way this time. We knew he was sick for a long time, but I didn’t know he had been this sick. He was only 63 years old, two years younger than my dad, a far cry from 92. The man who was married to my mom’s twin, who fathered three of my favorite cousins, who we watched Old School with at Thanksgiving is just gone. He’s gone and the most profound thing I can come up with is “You must feel like hell.”

I guess the most disconcerting thing about this is there’s no changing it. If you’re sick, you can get better. If your car breaks down, you fix it. If you’re in debt, you get a job. There’s a solution for all of these things, but not for death. With death, that’s it. There’s no solving this problem and that’s probably the scariest part of it. Not only is someone you love gone forever, but we’re suddenly made aware of our own mortality like no other event can make us. We can’t do anything except remember the good times we had with the departed. Thankfully, in this case are plenty. Of course that lesson, someone else taught me.