A little darkness
I don’t know if embracing the macabre is a stage of grief, but it is one that I keep revisiting. The Merriam-Webster definition of the word itself unravels quickly toward horror:
Macabre
1 : having death as a subject : comprising or including a personalized representation of death. 2 : dwelling on the gruesome. 3 : tending to produce horror in a beholder.
“Having death as a subject,” doesn’t seem that awful to me, anyway. Edward Gorey pen and ink drawings spoke to me as a child and into adulthood, those Victorian figures in “unsettling narrative scenes,” always drew me in. I was kind of goth for a little while in college, I’m a natural brunette with a cynical side, so that wasn’t too difficult. And now, because an extremely terrible most unlucky thing happened to me that elephant will always be in the room. I’m okay with the elephant, I’d gladly talk about the elephant all day and all night (its name is Daryl). But I know it’s hard for other people, and I think it’s because there is an even bigger elephant in the room which is that we are all going to die one day, and how do you talk about that without feeling like a real mood killer?
I Asked Death Questions
This summer, I’m taking a grief educator class with David Kessler, and a recent exercise was to close our eyes, imagine ourselves in a park or a comforting setting. We’re sitting alone and a stranger approaches, that stranger is death. We can ask it any questions we want. We were then asked to share what our version of death looked like—my group shared their versions, nearly all of them described a cherubic and sweet child. My death was an aging punk guy in a band t-shirt with a lot of tattoos, smoking a cigarette, a Lou Reed type character—gritty, gravelly, all-knowing.
“W” is for Widow
Over the last couple of years, I’ve gained a lot of respect for the Victorians and their customs. We cringe at the staged photos of their loved ones after death, the idea of having a dead body in the house seems unfathomable. Not to mention lockets with the hair of the deceased, the mourning jewelry, the black widow wardrobe. Our shiny, all pursuit of the new and young culture insists on facing death like quickly wrapping something up in an airtight bag and then putting it in storage and moving on. Personally, if I could sew a “W” onto my clothes or wear an onyx necklace designating me as a widow, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Though a black wardrobe in the heat of Virginia summer would be awful, It would save awkward conversations.
“We’ve taken death and banished it like a black sheep from the circle of life. By making it ‘bad’ we’ve denied ourselves so much of life.”
I hate surprises. Having mortality sprung on me during what was supposed to be the better years of my life and marriage, that second half of adulthood when things calm down and you are in a groove, was a real mind-fuck. I read the endings of suspenseful books, that’s how much I want to know the ending so I can prepare emotionally. I wish death wasn’t the experience that deepened my understanding of existence, I would have preferred an ayahuasca trip or a vision quest, but you don’t get to choose. We’ve taken death and banished it like a black sheep from the circle of life. By making it “bad” we’ve denied ourselves so much of life.
I’ve always leaned toward the sarcastic and one of the shows I love that has helped me digest the death era of my life is What We Do in the Shadows, a mockumentary about vampires who live on Staten Island. It’s brilliant in a million different ways, but the deadpan way they talk about their past lives, who they were, the tragedies that befell them is particularly hilarious:
"You people are as much fun as the plague. Remember the plague? And how much fun it was? That's this." —The Baron
"You are just a lovely guy that I took very strong sex with a couple hundred thousand times, and then my husband cut your head off. Move on!" —Nadja
I’ve said to more than one person that I’ve started to feel like a salty vampire. We have some similarities: Overnight, I possessed a dark knowledge of how finite life is and had the power to crush happiness just by existing. I wanted to crush a lot of happiness. Not long after Daryl, my fully healthy not-yet-40-year old husband, was diagnosed with colon cancer I watched a young couple walk up to our local juice bar. They looked fit and happy from their workout. They ordered some chai berry something and a wheatgrass shot. I wanted to knock it out of their hands and see the shock on their pretty young faces. Because that’s what I felt happened to us, one day we were discussing if we wanted a smoothie or a breakfast wrap, and the next day we were knocked completely on our backs researching the stages of cancer. I felt like Billy Crystal’s in When Harry Met Sally, specifically the scene when his friends are moving in together and trying to decide where to put their coffee table:
Harry: Right now everything is great, everyone is happy, everyone is in love and that is wonderful. But you gotta know that sooner or later you’re gonna be screaming at each other about who’s gonna get this dish. This eight dollar dish will cost you a thousand dollars in phone calls to the legal firm of That’s Mine, This Is Yours.
Sally: Harry.
Harry: Please, Jess, Marie. Do me a favor, for your own good, put your name in your books right now before they get mixed up and you won’t know whose is whose. ’Coz someday, believe it or not, you’ll go 15 rounds over who’s gonna get this coffee table. This stupid wagon wheel ROY ROGERS GARAGE SALE COFFEE TABLE!
How I Channeled My Anger
Not long after the juice bar fantasy, I decided to channel my anger toward someone who deserved it--the war criminal Dick Cheney. He seemed like a good choice: A callous, calculating zombie-like harbinger of American greed at the expense of innocent lives was still alive with someone else’s loved one’s heart beating in his old rotund frame. I allowed myself these particularly dark thoughts because they helped me gain perspective. First, other people’s health and happiness is not linked to mine, mortality is not a shared resource; which is how I avoided the “Why me?” “Why us?” scenario. Why NOT us? People have gone through far worse. Second, people who have knowingly lied, cheated and committed atrocious acts walk among us and there is not, unfortunately, a tribunal who decides who gets to suffer more, or less. Karma has helped me a lot with this.
I’ve struggled to grieve not just the death of my person, but also the loss of a romantic relationship which was a very good one. We spend so much of life working to intertwine with others, yet we have so little hopeful vocabulary for what happens during the un-twining, when forever ends. When it comes to divorce and relationship breakups, endless books and experts to help you get through it, understand yourself, your attachment style, or how to avoid the partners who will be bad for you, dig into a deeper understanding of yourself. But the death of something good is not the same as learning from something bad.
No one wants to be a buzz kill, but love, romance, all of it is intertwined with loss. It’s what makes life worthwhile. Instead, we act like our endings are not inevitable, when of course we DO know what’s going to happen and the elaborate dance of denial is, well, kind of hilarious. That’s not to say what happens when we lose someone is comedy, far from it, but there is a macabre sense of knowledge and insight you get from it.
The brilliant Mary Oliver, in “The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac,” a poem about having cancer, and yes, daring to have “death as a subject,” hit me particularly right the first time I read it:
1.
Why should I have been surprised?
Hunters walk the forest
without a sound.
The hunter, strapped to his rifle,
the fox on his feet of silk,
the serpent on his empire of muscles—
all move in a stillness,
hungry, careful, intent.
Just as the cancer
entered the forest of my body,
without a sound.
…
You could live a hundred years, it’s happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.