What Dying Does – To Others
Image by Gemini AI
It was January 2024, I was standing at my desk, trying to figure out why I couldn’t even buy a successful article on Medium when I got the call that my mother had passed away.
My brother-in-law in New York phoned and gave me some of the details of what had just happened, I just don’t remember any of them.
I knew she was in hospice. Knew the time was near. Even knew that she wanted to pass, but in her own words – she didn’t know how.
It seems that the 2789 miles between me and her at that moment somehow shook the space-time continuum, and all I received was static. I remember a quickening of the heart, and then it was quiet.
It was inevitable, I suppose. During a brief walk afterward, I started comparing my feelings with another day in my life—one that took place 58 years earlier when the family left Bronco Charlie’s Restaurant in Oakdale, NY.
We waited just outside for my dad to pay the bill and walked behind him as he reached the car. And then that was it.
Life exited my dad before he could get the key in the lock. Why? His heart finally gave out.
Watching someone die is like getting sucked out of an airplane. One minute you’re sipping tea or nibbling on a mediocre ham sandwich and the next, your body is infinitely compressed through a small opening and you’re floating in a place you just weren’t ready for.
It doesn’t matter how many weeks or months you have to prepare for that moment, there’s no way to truly get ready for it, that instant when they’re gone. No longer able to smile or answer a question. Or stroke your cheek like they always did.
Poof. No more.
Then the withdrawals begin. Like no cigarettes for 48 hours.
The absence is all you feel. The lack. The nothing that appears when you recall their name enter their room or hold the last thing they wore up to your face, to breathe them in.
Nothing. Well, except for the pain. That lingers. Never really goes away.
The thing is, people in our lives occupy space inside it. Like the old chair in the corner of the living room that Grandpa always sat in. It wasn’t just the wood and fabric and in years past, the smell of his pipe. It was him. His thoughts. His larger-than-life personality. His wisdom and sense of humor. Or the warmth you felt when he put you on his lap and told you a story.
They take up space and become part of the infrastructure of who we are, and when they’re suddenly gone, the whole thing feels weaker. Like someone notched the support beams and everything has started to sag. Becoming less stable – until we put something else in its place.
But what goes there afterward? How do you pick out something or someone to replace the person you loved and needed and used to help build and sustain your life?
You can’t. Not really. It’s not like I could find a new mom and insert her in the same spot where she lived for all of her 100 years. Not possible. Nothing else would fit. Time, shifted everything about until it was mostly luck and determination that held the whole thing together.
When people die, everyone they touched feels an unearthly tug. A tearing apart that unsettles them for a minute or the rest of their lives. Depending on how important they were.
And when people die that you never knew; not like family or the neighbor who lived next door for 50 years. But people out there, famous people. Celebrities you watched on TV all your life or went to see them in concert 12 times over the years but never met.
You feel the same way, just for a second or maybe a few. That withdrawal of their presence, their music, their laughter from your world, and everything within creaks and moans for a bit, while physics and gravity take hold and it all quiets down once again.
My life has had an empty space in it for over 58 years. Like a parking spot in the underground garage that’s always occupied by a shopping cart or stack of tires. Something never intended to hold that space forever, but it just turned out that way.
When my mother passed, my father’s passing moved in right next to it, together, like they were 58 years ago. Now, I can’t get them apart. I think of her and tears form for him. I think of the 1964 World’s Fair and how he held my hand as we walked and my mother’s voice fills my head.
“Hi Joey, how are you?”
We sometimes pretend that we’re okay. We’re fine, but we’re not. We’re not broken; we’re just troubled. Unstable, until something new and equally important gets put back into the spot left empty by their passing.
It’s Nature’s way of keeping it all together. Otherwise, the landscape would be littered with broken structures, all jumbled together. And nothing could move on.
It’s been over a year since my mother died and it hurts more today than it did last year. I’m kind of built that way, I guess.
I feel my father’s death more today than I did in 1966 when he passed. More than 1978 or 2012.
I seem to allow grief into my heart in small manageable amounts. Like adding one spoonful of flour to the batter at a time, stirring it constantly, and keeping it all together like it’s supposed to be. Never too much, never too little that you forget you should be feeling something.
I miss my parents terribly. Should I?
I mean, it’s been so long for my dad, so many years of not seeing him in the driveway coming home from work. Not sitting in his chair in the living room reading a book. Not feeling the warmth of his hand on my face.
Should it matter now, when I’m so much older and many things are no longer around? Gone. Plowed under or knocked down. Left town or left this life altogether.
Is it okay to grieve more today than I did when I saw him lying on the ground next to our 1961 Chevy Impala?
I think it is.
What dying does is take us all gently, almost lovingly by the scruff of the neck and shake the misconceptions, false narratives, and misspent moments right out of us. Until we’re more fixed in the present.
Seeing, hearing, and feeling what’s happening all around us right now and not what happened to us in the past; a position we somehow have come to see as a good place to hang out.
People die. Some far away. Some right next to us. It happens.
I grieve differently and have wrongly doubted my sincerity over the years because of it. Like I was doing it all wrong.
I wasn’t. It was the right way for me. It helped me to move on.
It helped me remember them without losing myself in the process.