Besides being a life altering and tragic thing, death is very complicated. We expect that when it happens we will know what to feel. We have been told there are stages that we should hop across like stepping-stones on the path to being whole again. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. But the Kübler-Ross model leaves out the emotion that for me has always been the most prevalent when death lays a fingerprint on my life: guilt. Guilt eats away at the denial, the anger, the depression and fills the spaces left by reason and perspective, which always seem to disappear in the face of loss. I feel guilty that the last thing I said wasn’t I love you, that it had been so long since we had spoken, that I’m alive and well while they have breathed their last. Guilt pervades every crevice of my existence. It disagreeably seasons my food, glues my shoes to the floor like bubble gum and turns mirrors into artistic likenesses of Medusa so that the only sanctioned activity seems to be grieving or attending church. It seems somehow disrespectful to laugh, go out with friends, and even take out the garbage as if nothing had happened. How rude to go on as if things were the same. How rude to live when someone has died.
But the way in which guilt gets me the most is when it hisses in a whisper over and over again: this isn’t your tragedy. I’ve been fortunate enough in life to so far not experience the kind of earth shattering loss that makes the planet go black. The kind that snuffs out the sun and feels very much like something out of Revelation, the apocalypse, the termination of all future existence. Both of my parents are alive, my friends scattered and strained but still breathing. I have lost people but never someone whose presence I demanded for my own existence or who had in their possession a piece of my soul. I have never known this tragedy and I am grateful. So in my past, when death stilled the spinning of the world on it’s axis for just a second and left behind the shadow of a loved one he had stolen I found that it was not my world he had stopped.
It’s true that I cried for days this summer lamenting the loss of an uncle I had truly loved, whose removal from my life left a large hole (and not just because he was a large man). I felt grief that has since subsided but is prone to flare-ups especially when I think about returning to Arizona for a Christmas without him. This grief had to fight being suffocated however, by the guilt of feeling that my loss could never compare with my fathers. My Uncle’s death was tragic, but it was not my tragedy. We had all lost someone we loved but the loss belonged to my Father. Four months later it still follows him around like an imaginary friend that only he can see. My grief was not that strong and so it allowed guilt to rope around it, intertwining the two as it had always been in the past. It was not my grandfather who died as much as it was my mother’s father. Not my Aunt as much as my Uncle’s wife. My parent’s neighbor who was like a father to me was in fact someone’s father and it was the loss of this father that brought his son home. These tragedy’s were not my own. I had no right to their sadness.
Today I found out that my favorite teacher has passed away. Passing at only 35 her story is a devastating one of cancer, two-year-old twins and a five-year-old boy left behind. Although it has been years since I have spoken to her I am still affected almost daily by the life lessons she instilled in me. She was my Psych Professor and a school favorite at Xavier; constantly dispensing advice, inspiration, and encouragement to hundreds of plaid skirted teenage girls over the years. It is a tragedy that the scope of lives affected by a single person is never realized until they are gone and now we are banded together in our memories and mourning, lamenting that we were among the last to be addressed as “future mother’s of America.” Although shocking the loss of our teacher, GP as she was affectionately known around Xavier, is almost insignificant when compared to the immeasurable grief that must be felt by her husband, or the devastation to her children, losing a mother at such a young age they might not even remember her. When I think of this, I cannot help but feel guilty for even experiencing a sense of loss. I try to remember however that in death grief is not rationed out. You do not have to be the most devastated to feel remorse that a life has been lost, that a person has been taken from you forever. There is no shortage of sadness in death and we can always make more. Regardless the relationship or history, in some ways the loss to the world of a great person is everyone’s tragedy.
RIP GP.
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