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{death and crying} jonathan bitz You just received the phone call: She’s gone. She’s dead. He’s dead. They’re dead. This is yesterday, today, tomorrow. This is nothing new. This is strangers with empty looks on their graying faces bumping into you during business hours. This is hospitals-full: here and there and all around you, all the time. This is death and dying and decay. This is what our bodies were built for. + A friend died today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. And I am sobbing because that’s what our bodies do when tremendous sadness and fear and unbelief drowns our drier, more sober parts. They say that the lacrimonal gland is a tear gland and it releases chemicals and hormones when we cry over emotional pain. They say that this is supposed to return our bodies to a stable state. They say lots of things and when you’re talking about death – we will, and do, say anything to assuage our fears. To calm our bodies. But I have never understood why we have a duct from one of our eyes to our nose. Not only does both of our eyes leak with fluid, but our nose does too. It’s as if: Where you once smell life, our body insults us and drowns our senses. As though this is a reminder of the intersection of the terrible sadness and the brilliant light that we call life. + But the thing is: When I am sobbing this hard, sobbing this long, sobbing this much and feeling psychically wounded – irreparable - I do not know who I am sobbing for. I do not know what these tears, exactly, are for. When I am crying, I do not know if I am crying for her, or him, or them – so much as I am crying for me. And us. And those that are left behind. A friend died today and I think I am crying for myself. George Carlin used to do a bit that spoke to the idea of what his family would do with his body after he dies. Carlin responded with something like: I don’t give a shit. I’m dead. Burn me, bury me, fuck me. Hell, do whatever you want, I won’t care. I’ll be dead. A friend died today and I think I am crying for myself. + At best, I’m halfway through my life. In reality, I’m probably nearing two-thirds. At best. When somebody dies around you – they leave behind a legacy. They leave stories and memories, children, their work and if you look closely – they leave behind gifts. With the recent loss of my friend I was afforded a couple of parting gifts. These gifts came in the form of ideas. One of these ideas is a common one. It revolves around the vignettes of where we left things with recently deceased: We wonder if we told that person how much they meant to us. We wonder if we said what we meant and meant what we said. We wonder if we loved them as hard as we wanted to, or loved them at all. Another idea came from the death of my friend. This one was a practical, employable notion that I will carry with myself forever more. This morsel came from a conversation I had with a musician, a friend, in town. And while he was both consoling me and helping me work through the cloud of my friend’s mysterious death, he offered me the idea that you can either build a house to enclose yourself off from the world, or you can build a pillar to grow from. Sometimes words are impossible to put into play… + Since I was a child I have been obsessed with death in the same way that you forget you have a common cold and have to go about your day. But as of now, we’re over thirty years into this ride. Sometimes I remember, sometimes I don’t. Remember that I, like you, have a lifetime cold. When I was a child, my fever nightmare was of me lying in empty space. I could see suns and planets over and under my shoulder. Strange that the terror was not in my weightlessness or the expansive vista, but rather in the notion that there was no-next time, no-tomorrow, no-other chances. Sometimes I remember this dream. Most of the time, I don’t. Then, sometimes my throat is scratchy from the solar winds and I remember that I have a cold. That I am, a cold. + Since I was a child I have heard the phrase, “get busy living or get busy dying”. In recent history it has come to my attention that I spent the bulk of my life doing neither. Instead, I sit on the fence, in-limbo, in life’s purgatory – self-inflicted. Always, always, I have sat somewhere in-between life and death. Living and dying. Sometimes words are impossible to put into play… + I admit it: I play this game of, “I wonder who around me will die next” or, “I wonder which new person in my life will die next”. Inexorably, I am never correct. It’s just that, with some people, you can feel their death on their face. Hear it in their laugh. And sometimes, smell it on them late at night. I like this game, because I never win. It’s unpredictable. And usually, with all the criterion that I have created over the years – none is an appropriate indicator of a quicker death. To be sure, we will all die one day. And maybe this is what I smell, all around me, in a compact city, full of bodies and lives: the collective scent of death. + Thomas Hobbes once wrote that everything is done for self preservation. And while I have never been able to refute that claim and while I believe heartedly in his words – I think that what the undercurrent of that sentiment is, is that: everything is done out of self preservation, because of death. We worry about legacy and what will be left behind. Sometimes we create these legacies to thwart the stoppage of our time on this planet. We want to live longer, further. Implicitly I do believe that all artists come to this point of realization in the same way that mothers and fathers do. For they believe that, in creating something that will become a legacy: I will have something that will outlive me. What is not being said within this mode of living is exactly that: that what is not being said. Through our obligations and duties and time clocks and relationships and diversions – death is brushed aside. Topically brushed aside. Thoughtlessly pushed away. The imperative? The redemptive? Here I will play off Nietzsche’s ubiquitous statement and say: What will kill me can make me stronger. Right now, as I am writing this, I am telling myself: Build a pillar from that and leap into the living. + Now, I will admit: Days away from my friend’s death and I am crying for death – as an abstract. I am sobbing for my death, her death and the days that were still left for living. I cry for sadness and pain and remorse and the things that were never said. But while I cry for all the unknowing in and around death, but still, I am stuck with the honest realization that in the end, I am crying for me. I am crying for what I am, what I don’t want to be, all the work I have left to do, and all the love I have still outstanding – to give and receive. I am terrified that I have nothing to leave behind. I am frightened that it’s too dark to see my pillar and whether or not it is growing, or if it is dark around me because I have enclosed myself in a blackened room with no doors and no pillars. And so I am reaching-out, to write this. To begin building a new pillar. Something that I can stand atop and maybe, just maybe, see a little clearer from. |
