Let's Face Tragedy

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

“The departed leave us a part of themselves,

so that we keep it, and we need to continue to live,

so that they continue. Why, in the end,

and life is reduced, whether we realize it or not"

I. Brodsky From a speech delivered at the evening in memory of Karl Proffer

Summer morning. Train. The measured tapping of wheels, a kaleidoscope of pictures outside the window. Sleepy appeasement. The phone buzzes. I am thrown out of the slumber. I know very well what this call promises. So it is: Colin's dad is dead. My condolences, I say words, and I feel how life is being divided into parts, opening up into "before" and "after". I remember my mother, grandmother, friends. How is it to live with them and live without them? Live with them and not notice that they are near. To live without them, and to feel the echoing emptiness. In this emptiness, life with them acquires a different meaning and meaning, but it is no longer there, and life without them loses its meaning, but it must be lived. I'm crying. Not about Kolya, about myself.

I go into the room, looking for Kolya with my eyes. Here he sits, near the wall, calmly nods his head to me. In my reality, his life is already broken, divided. In his reality, dad is still alive, and will live until I drink coffee, calm down, collect my thoughts. This happens when the plane crashed, and happy relatives tread with flowers at the airport and hastily glance at the scoreboard. Now the long-awaited meeting will take place, now they will be animatedly waving their hands, hugging their relatives, there is so much to tell, so much to listen to, now…. If you realize at once that "now" will never come, you can go crazy, suffocate, go blind.

Just as we do not feel pain when we cut badly, so we do not feel a mental wound in full force. Someone carefully put a fuse so that the psyche would not close, so that a fire would not occur, so that we could survive.

Kolya enters, I say: “Kolya, your dad is dead. I'm sorry". It is unbearable to be silent next to him. "Want some tea? Do you want some coffee? " He wants nothing. Went to smoke. Returned. "May I hug you?" "Can". I feel relieved. At least something has happened, at least something can be useful. Further details, conversations about the organization of the funeral. Two hours later I see Kolya laughing with the guys. All the guys are lively and cheerful. Nobody wants to be in touch with grief. We are used to not noticing our own and other people's mental pain, we do not know how to handle it.

The numbness can end immediately, or it can continue indefinitely, taking away our strength and energy to suppress pain. The duration of the shock depends on the individual characteristics of the psyche, on the level of mental health, and on life experience. Has the person seen how the close ones express bitter feelings; was it allowed in the family to cry, be weak, make mistakes, grieve; are there people to share with; whether the expression of feelings is favored by cultural traditions shared by the individual; is the person afraid of hurting his loved ones with his suffering, etc.

In a daze, a person is constrained, unable to breathe deeply. He has stepped into the present with one foot, while the other is still stamping on the past. Perhaps he does not find the strength to part with a loved one, still clinging to the reality in which he is still nearby, in which the arms are not open, the conversation is not interrupted. It is frozen. Insensitivity, deafening. What is happening is moving away, becoming unsteady, unreal. Half-life, half-oblivion. Then the events can be remembered as confused, indistinct, or they can be completely forgotten.

This is followed by the search phase, the rejection phase. We see the deceased in the crowd. The phone rings and we hope to hear a familiar voice. Here he habitually rustles the newspaper in the next room. Suddenly we stumble upon his things. Everything around reminds of the past. We stumble over reality, and find peace only in sleep.

“……… For in the dark -

there lasts that which broke off in the light.

We are married there, married, we are the ones

double monsters, and children

just an excuse for our nakedness.

Some future night

you will come again tired, thin, and I will see a son or a daughter, not yet named - then I

I will not jerk to the switch and away

I can’t reach out my hand, I don’t have the right

leave you in that kingdom of shadows, silent, before the hedge of days,

falling into dependence on reality, with my inaccessibility in it."

(I. Brodsky "Love")

This can continue until the end of the work of grief. It seems that the mind is cheating on us, that clarity of mind will never return.

But reality knocks at our doors, and a moment comes when it becomes impossible not to hear this persistent knock. And then the pain of awareness is overwhelmed by a fierce wave. This is a period of despair, disorganization, regression.

“Let's look into the face of the tragedy. We'll see her wrinkles

her hook-nosed profile, the chin of a man.

Let's hear her contralto with a touch of devilry:

the hoarse aria of the investigation is louder than the squeak of the cause … … …

Let's look into her eyes! In extended in pain

pupils, induced by the force of will

like a lens on us - either in the stalls, or

giving, on the contrary, in someone's destiny a tour …"

(I. Brodsky "Portrait of a Tragedy")

This is a period of grief without measure, an emotional outburst. An adult behaves like a small child: he knocks his feet, sobs, beats like a fish on ice. Awareness of loss brings with it rage, anger, anger. We blame the doctors, the driver of a car who hit a dear to us, firefighters who arrived at the wrong time, a broken elevator, traffic jams, we are angry with God because life is unfair, against ourselves for being alive. We are angry with the deceased, because he will never experience the pain that haunts us, because he left us, left us, left, and we stayed to live. Rage gives out energy, connects us with reality.

Anger goes hand in hand with guilt. We blame ourselves for the rage, for not done. Numerous “ifs” appear: if I were there, if I noticed in time, if I insisted, if I sent him to the doctor, if I spent more time with him and an infinite number of unrealizable ones if … I could to be more careful, I had to say, I would spend time with you, I would not hurt you, I could just love you and thousands more unrealizable "would". By blaming ourselves, we protect ourselves from our own helplessness. As if death were in our power, as if we had a chance to prevent it. If we can control, we will not be overtaken by despair, hopelessness, powerlessness. Everything we have done up to this point is like pulling a safety catch. But to push off, you have to dive to the bottom.

The bottom is despair. This is a period of genuine sadness, when any action is given hard, through force, we cannot breathe deeply. “A scream is crowded in the network of ligaments in the throat, but the time has come, and then don't scream…” Chest tightness, hypersensitivity to smells, I do not want to eat. I do not want to live, the support under my feet is lost, the meaning disappears. Loneliness, hopelessness, anger. The image of the deceased haunts us everywhere. We think about what he would be doing now, what he would say, he could help us, support us. We idealize him, forgetting that he was a person with merits and demerits. Dissolving in our melancholy, we can imitate his movements, facial expressions, gestures. People around you become uninteresting, extraneous conversations cause irritation. Why all this if it cannot be returned? Attention is scattered, it is difficult to concentrate. We plunge into a maelstrom of pain, reach the bottom to push off, to return to a world where there is no deceased, where we have to rebuild life, but without him. This rupture causes unbearable pain - the pain of transition from an illusion in which he is still alive, or where at worst we can decide something, to a reality where he is not, and we are powerless. Grief absorbs a person, completely owns his life, making up its core, center, essence for some time.

The exit occurs through identification with the deceased. We start to like the things he loved, the music he listened to, the books he read. We understand how much we had in common.

The last step in the work of grief is acceptance. Its essence is that despite the many things that unite us, we are different people. One person remained to live, while his loved one died. But he would never have become who he is now, if the deceased was not in his life. Gradually the grief recedes, we sink to the bottom less and less often, we manage to separate from the deceased, life is gradually improving. The pain comes back sometimes, especially on the days we spent together. First new year without him, first birthday, anniversary. All these events return us to despair, but it no longer seems total, all-embracing, powerful. Life gradually returns to us, we stop sharing it with the departed. Its true image, advantages and disadvantages are restored. Memories of him become part of our personality, take a place in the heart, and we can continue to live, carrying a part of it in ourselves. The grief ends. We need to distribute things, free up the space of life, preserving the memory of the past.

The sad law of being is that no one leaves life alive. Like a stone thrown into water leaves circles on the surface of the water, so every life leaves a mark on other people. We carry the memory of long-dead ancestors, the memory of generations, the memory of peoples. We live and die, we rejoice and we grieve, we lose and we find. The path of loss is the path that transforms us, making us hardened, compassionate, and wiser.

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