My daughter – who just graduated high school last week – got the news that a classmate of hers, the boyfriend of a close friend, died in a freak accident. Within a week of graduation. The details aren’t important and I don’t want to write about them here so as to memorialize the pain of that tragedy on the odd chance a family member or friend sees my blabbering, but I had the unfortunate ‘opportunity’ to get to talk about Death with my daughter when I picked her up at the airport the other day. Not a week later, at my niece’s graduation a state away, there was a moment of silence from her graduating class for a member of the class who died when she was a sophomore. Both of these things led me to some sobering thoughts and words for my daughter.
First, the odds are that this happens in just about every high school across the country every few years. The statistics on DUIs and drowning alone are mind-numbing, but then add in normal teenage silliness brought on by a belief in their own invincibility, recreational drugs and alcohol, suicide, and other plagues of modern society and it really isn’t all that uncommon. Notice I didn’t say that it’s commonality makes it any less tragic… it still is, no matter how relatively “common” it may or may not be.
I bring this up only as it reflects on what I could say to my daughter, which is not something inane about how uncommon it is. The reality is that from this moment forward her life will be filled with a steadier and steadier stream of people around her dying. With any luck, the normal course of events will be people who are (mostly) emotionally distant from her (Insha’allah), but ultimately will culminate with me and her mom in the dirt. And so as I talked to her about it I tried to gauge her response, which seemed to run the normal gamut of emotions and I got to thinking and talking about the many, many times in my life I’ve been around and seen death.
It’s an awfully long and tragic list. And while I’ve been fortunate, I suppose, to have not lost a parent to a major illness, and to have a family blessed with great genetics on both parents’ sides with respect to aging, if I list out the people close to me who have died, it’s a very steady stream of people, many of whom were in their 30’s or younger, and with whom I was very close. I’ve also watched other people close to me deal with the death of loved ones: My ex-wife lost her mother (52) and grandmother on the same day to natural causes (grandma) and then a brain aneurysm (mom while tending to grandma’s just deceased body). A close girlfriend when I was in my teens whose father died of cancer when she was 16. A very close girlfriend/fiancee a few years ago whose father passed from cancer.
The list could go on and on, but the thing I’ve tried to learn, that I wanted to pass along to my daughter, was some kind of philosophy or outlook or set of skills to cope with these losses so that she is prepared for these events – which are only going to continue to come and with ever-increasing frequency as she gets older. And likely they are going to happen to people she knows better and better and to whom she is much more deeply attached. And so I tried to provide some perspective, while explaining that some of the feelings she had were very normal and she shouldn’t feel guilty about feeling that way.
A few things stick out at me from my experiences with Death. First, the sense of unfairness. This manifests itself in a variety of ways. There’s this unexpected bitterness that comes on at the oddest times – standing in line listening to people bitch about the price of their latte or gossip about how someone else is dressed – producing a near physical urge to scream at people and make them understand that THEY ARE ALIVE and someone who may have been far nicer and more deserving and appreciative of life, is now DEAD. This can lead to further thoughts of the unfairness of it all and a very serious questioning of one’s faith, and if it is mixed with sufficient quantities of alcohol, of the pointlessness of life, of despair…
I think what has helped me through all of this is a philosophy. I earnestly believe that an underlying metaphysic for one’s life, and living (broadly), can genuinely ameliorate a lot of this. So what the hell does that mean? Well, I’ll tackle that in a subsequent post and then work my way back to my advice to my daughter.