Grief: Final thoughts

This is the final part of my three part set of reflections on grief you can find part one and part two in these links.

In the previous parts of my reflections I covered the spiraling and descending nature of grief. How the initial shock and loss of innocence when facing loss shakes us to the core and how if we let it, settling into the bottom of the our sadness brings new life. In this final post I want to wrap up these themes and offer what I hope will be more value.

In the final chapters of Martin’s book How to Survive and Shipwreck. Martin reflects on his time in New Orleans. I myself went to Mardi Gras after my mother’s passing and like Martin I was moved to learn that New Orlean’s culture and spirit so deeply intertwined sadness and loss with joy and celebration. A California transplant I met there informed me that I had to understand that life in New Orleans had always been tough. Disease would take nearly 10% of the city annually and nowadays the ever present threat of storms and hurricanes is always close by. “You have to celebrate and be glad when you can if you’re going to live here” said the man from California. “Not to try and distract yourself from the horror but to defy it”. As I walked the street, ate too much butter, and marveled at the sea of color and uninhibited joy surrounding me. I would catch myself thinking about my mother, now buried along side my grandparents and their siblings. My mother wasn’t an especially extroverted or flashy person but I couldn’t help but think she would have been caught up in the same energy that flowed through the streets. I wished she was there but in a sense knew she was, among the countless stories and lives behind them surrounding me. I was not the only one who had lost, and neither was I the only feeling joy at that moment in time.

So back to the topic of old 90s video games. Majora’s mask closes out with your character having done his best to heal the land and people around him just to have to face the fact that the moon is literally falling. While your character has been out and about, the main villain of the story has been dragging the moon down. Instead of facing loss in more constructive ways the titular character of the game is nothing but rage and bitterness embodied. Through entirely optional content you can learn that prior to be possessed by an evil mask the person who was pulling the moon down felt abandoned by his friends and was ultimately shunned due to then coping by antagonizing those around him. That’s when he happens to steal a mask that gives him godlike powers. If you want to stay up all night and remain single minded about any task, hatred and anger will do that for you. There’s a reason why there’s a saying about not letting your anger follow you into your sleep. It’ll keep you up all night, the physiological affects will just fuel the anger already present. And like many people in the world today, that eventually bears fruit in a nihilistic and self destructive fit of rage. Not only does this anger self destruct but it also seeks to be punitive towards others with seeming no meaning or purpose.

But in the game given that you’ve helped fix everything by the third day. The moon doesn’t fall, instead its held up, while the cursed mask flies off to the moon. There your character now more mature and equipped with talismans that when exchanged turn your character from a child and into an adult. If you manage to pull this off the normally penultimate challenge of defeating evil, becomes comically easy. Literally just a matter of chasing down the erratic demon in front of you back into the creepy wooden mask that it came from. This was a weird way to end a weird game and story. Though I think it’s poetic in a sense.

We don’t remove or get rid of grief or anything else that troubles us. We grow beyond it till it’s nothing more than a small creature sitting by our feet. In the last chapter of Martin’s book, he recalls the case of a family he tended to as a pastor. The father of the family had drifted into a coma, one that he wouldn’t wake from. The decision to let him go, was one the family struggled with for a time. But ultimately they had to let go of resuscitation, for there to be any hope of resurrection. There’s ultimately no other choice when you look at the fact around us. There was a day without us and there will be many more to come. This is all doomed in quite a literal sense. The earth had a beginning and it will have an end. This is both a scientific and religious principle. One of the things that occurred to me: we will all face the kind of loss I’m experiencing someday. Came to me as friends admitted they didn’t know what to say in the aftermath of my mother’s passing. There’s no hiding, no distraction, or mental sidestepping one can perform to avoid loss. You can only stand and look deep into the pain, in hopes that something within there will restore you. And that’s where I cannot say I have much more practical advice other than to move through it. Taking all the help you can from those around you, in activities that ground you, and beliefs that carry you forward. Weather you hope for rebirth in the Pure Land, the world to come, the Kingdom of God, or a return of your atoms to the stars.

A month or so after my mother’s passing. I was standing on a pier overlooking the ocean with a friend of mine from my church who lost his own mother at a similar age as mine. As we looked out across the dark turbulent waters, talking about the emotions and doubts that arise from loss. At a point the pain I had been feeling in my gut for months didn’t disappear but instead felt more relaxed. Like a tight ball turned into a soft and ever moving ball of wax. Instead of being caught by and held down by it, I felt like it was something I could observe, hold in my hands, and mold as I saw fit. I felt like my mother was still close though I knew she had gone away.

The dichotomy of letting go and holding on is where I find myself at rest now. I no longer live with my mother’s advice and critiques of my life choices, but I know what she would have said. What she still says, when I interact with the friends and family she herself shaped. Martin refers to New Orleans as a city beneath the sea. Which is literally the case geographically but also in a metaphorical sense as a contradiction in terms. In both joy and sadness we seek the same thing, transcendence an escape from a limited perspective. The city beneath the sea, wears the scars of past floods, knowing that there’s life on the other side. As I watched my first patch of peppers bear fruit in my backyard I could see that the collapse of everything around me, things still grew, still flourished. I know and have experienced that transformation. I can’t go back to who I was before even though I still wish none of this had happened. It’s not a matter of liking old Corey more than the one that exist or not. It’s about seeing one as the logical progression of the next and seeing as one who can live both above and under the waves. And the good news is you can too.