Why does it matter to even ask these questions, to which I can't know the answers? It was important to me that Jen didn't die on her own, but that I was there as much as I could be, and that prayer at least was granted. I'm also very glad that I wasn't working during her last week (although we didn't of course know the end was that close), and that we had a lot of time together, even if at times it was dominated by pills and pain.
Curiously the movie also made me think of the experience of grief, where at times it feels as though I am 'locked in', unable to communicate properly about what it's like to be here. I came across the following quote in the first volume of "A Series of Unfortunate Events", after the three children have found out that both their parents have died in a fire:
It is useless for me to describe how terrible Violet, Klaus and even Sunny felt in the time that followed. If you have ever lost someone very important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine.I think that in fact you can imagine, and in a way the purpose of this blog is to help others imagine what's it's like for us now. But even if you can grasp the nature of each separate experience of loss, it is the sheer immensity of it that still overwhelms. It is not just that I experience the loneliness of missing Jen now, or that I have very little adult contact at home, but that these experiences stretch on and on, day after day, month after month. It feels like running an endurance race without a finishing point, one that will stretch on indefinitely into the invisible distance of time. Fortunately my life will be finite, and there is still much to be thankful for every day. I need to learn to appreciate those things, so I can look forward to what I do have, instead of just being swamped by the demands of keeping life going.
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The honesty, directness and realness of this post affected me immediately and it took a few days to think how to put my thoughts about its two subjects into words. It seems to me that if something matters, it matters. Also, when we see the face of a person talking, smiling, sleeping, or as you also saw with Jen, in pain, unconsciousness and then in death, it seems natural to ask what the experience of that moment is for them. It's the same engagement, wonderment, curiosity that in the course of love and marriage will be expressed in emotions that range (from times to certain times) between extremes and from the sublime to the ridiculous. We acknowledge the truth of another's experience and being even though we can't know it. That being is what matters and so it does matter and is important and good to ask, what did she think, feel and see? The answers are important in their unknowability, and the asking is even more important. She is not here now but her being is no less valuable and special now than it was when she was alive. At a certain level even the dearest others will always be a mystery to us, yet the mystery holds endless charm. The asking and the not knowing is a way of realising again both the specialness of the other person and our separateness from them, and the two are linked. On the same point, perhaps in our observation of another's actions from the outside and trying to intuit what their experience feels like on the inside, we are learning and preparing for our own future lives and deaths. (You seem to refer to something like this when you write about this writing being a way for you to "help others imagine". I think you're right. We are all each other's teachers and our truthful reflection of our experience is of great value to the others in the world although we may never realise it.) On the second point, the seemingly infinite and inevitable repetition day after day of the aloneness and solo duties that come with being the surviving partner and the only surviving parent, of not seeing a way forward beyond an endless recurring reality, I have no logical conceptual thoughts but a strong feeling or image of negative and positive space, of something coming into being out of nothing. These two subject seem linked to me. There is wisdom in not knowing and not seeing. Both are conducive to letting go and living in faith, because knowledge and sight are of no use and we can't control anything. But the reality of life is still there all along, beneath, above, around and within the greyness, and it will have its way and come into being in its own time. May life bless you and bless us all.
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