Mourning

This is the truth or as close to it as I can get - that’s why I’m writing this. My mind is currently a muddle of thoughts, and I need to sort it out, frankly and honestly relaying everything I’m currently feeling.

Before today, I was completely unaware of the norms; I have never experienced the death of anyone close to me. All the people I have lost, I didn’t really lose. There has never been anyone vaguely close to me and so I have never been to a house to pay my respects. Which is why I didn’t know how things would be when people came to pay their last respects - would people smile - is that allowed? Did people crack jokes, laugh? Or would that be insulting and insensitive? I didn’t know how to handle someone else crying - I had thought it would be so awkward (and don’t get me wrong, it is) but in that moment, I realised there is not much you can do and that whatever is to be done comes naturally and instinctively; I also realised that people who have done this before had more or less the same response I did - but they were more confident in their capacity to lend comfort. I felt a little useless; at the same time, I thought that if I was in the same position, I’d just want to have a cry and nothing said might really help - it was this thought that always holds me back from giving anyone any real comfort - I stay back and give them space, because I think perhaps that’s what I would want. I realise that people deal with things in different ways, but I cannot shake this course of action (or inaction, rather). I do not know if it is good or bad, or if there is a good or bad.

I often have visions of losing people (and cats) whom I really care about. I think about how I’ll feel, and how people around me will react to the situation and how I’ll handle their reactions - and what I realise is that I dread such events because of the latter - for I find my own emotional turmoil would be very easy to handle, while somebody else’s would be extraordinarily difficult.

When I say that my own emotional turmoil is easy to handle, I mean that I know exactly how I will feel. There are some people (and cats) whose death would make a great impact on my life, and I know this because thinking about such a situation makes me feel miserable and helpless. With others, I know I can hold it together- move on without much effort. Once again, I find myself in a position where I feel like I am being cold and practical. The tumultuous emotions I am currently experiencing really have nothing to do with loss, but rather with the question of change, or of life itself. It’s not the thought that my grandfather is dead, but the spectacle of his lifeless body, so fragile - eventually even having to be handled, transferred from a frozen compartment, to a white cloth, robed and then onto a stretcher. If I had not been made to witness that, I don’t think I’d have felt half the things that I am now; I can barely imagine how my mother feels, having directly partaken in the task herself.

Other than this, I am now trying to fend off those unwieldy thoughts of death and of loss. Not the one that has already taken place, but the ones that will - and those times, I will have to come to terms with my loss, with the end, with the finality of it all. A constant ache, rather than a memory here and there, now and then, a small spilling of salty tears.

What bothers me - scares me - the most now is that if anyone knew this, they would not appreciate me for it.

“You’ll miss him,” They ask me - or tell me, I’m not sure which. I will, but the fact is, not as much as I could.

What does that make me?

I don’t know.

And it bothers me.

And I need to tell someone, but I cannot, which is why I am writing this. To tell you without telling you.