Living Death

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

My father died 1.5 months ago. Since then, I have seen too much death around me. For me this is not surprising, I know this is how the field works. Every day I see someone on Facebook writes about the death of loved ones, today all Facebook writes about those killed in the St. Petersburg metro.

I just recently stopped denying my father's death. According to Kübler-Ross, the stages of living the loss look like this:

1. Shock

2. Denial

3. Anger

4. Sorrow

5. Compromise

6. New life

So, quite recently, I smoothly moved from the stage of denial to the stage of anger. And I'm angry.

I am angry that I live this loss so slowly. I want to live it faster and quickly return to my wonderful daily activities. Paradoxically, the more I tried to live and go about my usual business, the less I could get a taste of this life. The whole word that is happening around me is filled with water, and everything I do is like in water: slower and more muffled. And yet I could not cry and could not write anything about the death of my father, despite the abundance of thoughts in my head and the tone of emotions in my heart.

I think I'm lucky - I'm a psychologist. And I have a well-developed observing ego, and therefore I understand well what is happening to me. Moreover, I have a great interest in how things will happen next. That is why I so wanted to take notes of my reflections from the very day of my death - so as not to miss anything for the sake of scientific interest. However, even yesterday the attempt to make recordings was stopped. And before that, I did not even make an attempt, since I could not admit the death of my father.

I will return to the topic of my tears. Of course, when I found out about my father's death, I cried, even cried. It was in the first few days. Then I acted mechanically, I just survived - I watched TV shows, and slept at night. I practically did not feel anything, I just lived as usual. Then this feeling of life through the water column appeared. In addition, my whole body was swollen, my face looked like I was drinking a lot of water at night, my arms and legs were swollen. I looked for the reason in food, but of course the reason was in the lake of tears, which froze in me or in which I froze.

Very soon after returning to personal therapy, I had a dream that propelled me very much forward in dealing with my loss. Here I want to express my deep gratitude to my personal therapist for the opportunity to touch my grief, because this is the only way to live it.

In my dream, I watch a movie on my laptop as usual. This time, I chose a new up-and-coming movie about space. A new planet is shown on the screen, to which people flew from Earth in their round spaceship. The ship's sphere rises above the planet's surface. And nearby, to the right of the ship, there is the same size and the same round salt lake in which the aliens live - they are completely water and ride on water horses. It is strange that they are called aliens at a time when these water riders are the indigenous inhabitants of the planet, and people are the aliens. In the next shot, I see the internal structure of the ship, there is a whole small city, for example, there is even a school where children study. During the lesson, the water riders attack, which disintegrate into drops and the children in a panic rush to put on their spacesuits so that not a drop of salt water gets on them, as it can damage their skin. At this moment, I hear the alarm clock ringing, and I regret that I will never see who wins the final of the movie. But I reassure myself with the thought that people always win in American cinema, so everything will be fine. With this thought I wake up.

On the same day, I wondered what kind of metaphor of my soul was reflected in this dream and found the answer. First of all, you should pay attention to the location of the ship and the lake. The ship is on the left and the lake is on the right. Everyone knows that the hemisphere for logic is on the left and the hemisphere for feelings is on the right. The salt lake is undoubtedly the emotional lake of tears, the lake of sorrow that I am trying to avoid. People in spacesuits living on the ship are my functional part, which protects myself from grief, because I am afraid to drown in it, because it is very important to continue performing all functions in order to survive. Also, these two worlds - there is a classic splitting into an injured part and a functional part. The trauma is so great that the psyche is unable to cope with it, so it is forced out into another world with the help of defenses. The Water Riders are aliens, because I did not seek and did not expect the death of my father, it was sudden for me and rather I am a hostage to this grief, despite the fact that I control a spaceship that symbolizes my life in a dream.

The climax of the dream - the alien attack on the ship symbolizes the inevitable necessity of my meeting with grief. I do meet him often, and every time I look away because the time is not the right time for crying or the place, and because I don’t want to face grief alone. Once the ship has landed on this planet, then collisions with its inhabitants will be inevitable. During an alien attack, children wear spacesuits to avoid contact with water, as it burns their skin. This is a metaphor for how great my grief is and how difficult it is for me to face it - I am literally afraid that I will burn out in it. It is interesting that the root of the words "grieve" and "grieve". If you have ever cried with "burning tears", then you know - these are tears that really burn the skin.

Also, the children in my dream talk about two more things. For my father, I always remain a child, and of course such a loss, for a little girl inside me, is irreplaceable and very painful. Secondly, children wearing spacesuits without adults symbolize my loneliness when meeting this grief, I have to take care of myself (put on a spacesuit), otherwise no one will save me.

For me, this dream is an excellent illustration of my internal processes. Thanks to him, I saw the depth of my suffering and now I respect all the processes that take place inside me, including the physical ones. I understand that someday something will change in me again, but as long as I remain with what is and observe this is already part of my grief.