Everyone I Know Goes Away in the End

Not a story, not an essay, more of a blog or a meandering--but there is not selection for that.

I can look at the infinite night sky and know that if I were granted the time and ability to search out all the innumerable galaxies and stars-- if I could explore all times and all spaces--I would never find her face hidden among them. She is dead. She does not exist among any galaxy, among any star, on any planet. When I search out the entire universe for her, she is not there.

She is dead. That is the only certainty, for I can no longer be certain about her existence. I know she probably existed. I believe she wasn’t merely some random dream I once had, and upon musing on it, confused it with some memory. So I am reasonably certain she existed, but not as certain as the fact that she exists no longer. Someone will try to tell me that she exists in some form in some place, but if I cannot reach her, or greet her, or experience her in a real, tangible way, she does not exist because she does not exist here, and I do. So existence in a realm that is cut off from existence here is still non-existence from the point of view of the living.

But my point in that is not that I believe I imagined her, or that she was a delusion--any more than any of us is a delusion to any other of us, for do we ever know the true person? Are we not, after all, delusions to each other? Aren’t we delusions to ourselves? We think we know each other, we think we know ourselves, but we barely scratch the surface. My point, was that I cannot trust my memory of her--I cannot trust that my memory of her is accurate.

I hear people speak of Ronald Reagan in a way that does not reflect the reality of Ronald Reagan that I remember. Yet, they are not being deliberately dishonest. They are expressing a truth as they recall it, but that truth may not reflect the historical truth or the historical record. Maybe they knew the essence of the man better than I, and maybe their recollection is based on a deeper awareness of the inner-man that rewrites the historical truth, so that it is neither fact, nor fiction, but true, yet, not.

How can I trust that I have not done the same thing with her? How can I trust that I remember her correctly? Have I distorted certain aspects of her and ignored others? Is the person she is in my head the person she was on earth? Did I ever know her? Was she only ever at best a meeting of the fiction in my head and a reality in my view? And now that she is no longer in view, what now? Is there only fiction?

At least while she was alive, she could correct the fiction. She could, like a merciless psychic editor, leap at me by merely existing, forcing me to rewrite the fiction, making resemble more and more the fact of her, even though, I, as a writer, resent the editing process. So when I think of her, when I speak of her, there is no certainty that it IS her. There is only an awareness that this is the “her” that exists in my mind, and the “her” that existed in the world no longer exists in this or any other world. She is dead. That is the only statement I can utter, or think, or experience with certainty. She was, but she is no more. And if she is in some heavenly realm, she is only there and not here, and my mind, like my body, is not in heaven, but here where she is not. So regardless of what I want to believe, and regardless of what may be on some level I cannot fathom, she is dead. I have no access to her, not even in my memories of her, because my memories may be lies I have told myself and choose to believe.

And so, it is not the loss itself, but the awareness of the loss that makes it unbearable. Even after that passage of time. It is not the toothache, but the awareness of the toothache"the awareness that the toothache is keeping me awake at night, the awareness that I am not sleeping. It is not the loss, but the awareness of the loss. If I reach into my pocket to fetch my keys, and while so doing, a hundred dollar bill falls from my pocket unnoticed, I do not experience pain or loss or fear or anger. I have lost it, but I am not aware that I have lost it, so I feel nothing of the grief of losing it. If I should become aware that I had it, but I have it no longer, then I will experience the pain of having lost it. I will try to trace my steps when I had it. I will try to remember what it looked like, how I experienced it, where I placed it. I will be plagued by the memories and thoughts of what I was going to do with it. In both cases I lost the same hundred dollar bill, but in the first instance, I was unaware and felt no pain or loss even though it was just as certainly gone as when I was aware I had lost it.

This is the burden of consciousness--awareness. Not merely self-awareness, which is offered by many as the definition of consciousness, but other-awareness, which is the cause of pain. For I can never really lose myself; therefore, I can never be aware of losing myself. I am aware of losing what is other"even the things I believe are me, or make me who I am. I can lose my humor, my intelligence, my speech, my arm, my leg, my skill, but that is not losing me. It is losing something other that I confused with me.

So it is the other--the awareness of the other, the awareness of losing the other, the awareness of the other no longer being there, that causes pain. And yet, even knowing this, when I think of never having the other that, or who, was lost, the prospect of never having them in the first place feels like a greater pain the pain of their loss. If I had never known them, I would never experience the pain of losing them; yet, having known them, I would rather have them, knowing that I would lose them, than never having them at all.

And isn’t that an absurd conundrum? The things and people that fill our lives are the very things that will one day, sooner or later, cause us pain, or we will cause them pain. Every relationship ends, even those that are enduring, because one of those in the relationship will die before the other, and not always in the manner we expect. Death of a spouse is equally part of marriage as the honeymoon. So we attempt to treat well those who have died, just as we have always tried to treat them well while they were alive.

Death is what we experience in the other and dying is what we experience in ourselves. I did not experience her dying, I experienced her death. She alone experienced her dying, just as I alone will experience my dying. Those who remain, who care, and even those who don’t really care, will experience my death. They have to live without me, just as I have to live without her; but I never will live without me, just as she never lived without herself. There can be no hole in my own life due to me no longer existing because I cannot know my own nonexistence"I cannot know my own death. But no one else can die for me, not in the literal sense. It is like in baseball: I may be on the team, wear the uniform, sit in the dugout with the other players, but I have to face the pitcher on my own, all by myself. No one else can do it for me. If I want to run the bases, I have to swing the bat, which means I have to face the pitcher on my own. Life and death, it seems to me, is like that.

Perhaps the pain of losing the other is the point, or part of the point. If I am aware that I am going to lose everyone and everything if I live long enough, then maybe that is the only way I can appreciate what and who I have while I have them. If I get married knowing that if I live long enough, I will experience the death and loss of my wife, maybe that will keep me from falling into the trap of thinking of her as a chore while she is alive. Because it is my observation that what we expect to have forever, we fail to appreciate, and over time, we treat badly. It is the fear of loss that keeps us appreciative. Some of us are lazy and don’t like walking or exercising; yet, if we were told we were going to lose a leg or our ability to walk, we would do all the walking we could in the time we had left to do so. We would finally appreciate walking when we were faced with the reality of losing our ability to walk, and once the walking is no longer possible, we would experience the pain of not walking, even though we hated it when we could.

It may be a sad statement that the only way we can appreciate what and who we have through the fear or experience of losing it, but we are feeble, fallen creatures--we are broken after all, and little truly reflects our brokenness more than that. Yet, perhaps that is too cynical an understanding. Perhaps is it unfair to simply say that because we are fallen and broken, we can only seem to appreciate what we have when we experience it’s loss, even though we cannot be certain we accurately recall what it is we have lost. We are certainly broken, and this may be a reality resulting from our brokenness, but this may be a gift granted in our brokenness and not just an unfortunate consequence of it.

If it is a gift, it may seem a poor one. But if we can only appreciate what we have when we lose it, and if the loss causes us pain, then the awareness that we are going to lose it should inspire us to appreciate it while we have it, and rather than being resentful for losing it, which is absurd if we know we are going to lose it, we may instead feel gratitude for having it in the first place. Instead of blaming God or circumstance for taking it away, we may thank God or circumstance for giving it to us in the first place, and if we are lucky during our time of having, thank God or circumstance for the ability to appreciate it while we still had it. I cannot blame God or fate or circumstance or time for removing from me what I was told I was going to lose in the first place as a condition of having. Because, as I said, when we think of the prospect of never having what we had lost, we tend to be glad to have had it even though the loss of it causes so much pain.

She is dead. This meandering does not change that. These thoughts do not make her any more alive in any sense of the word. But if I can remember that she could have very easily never been in my life, I can learn to appreciate her all the more, even though my appreciation is tied to the imperfect memory of her that may or may not be accurate, and I can learn to thank God for her, rather than blame God for taking her. And maybe, after all, that is the true pain in the loss--the awareness that I even though I did appreciate her, I never appreciated the gift she truly was, and now the gift is gone, not as a punishment for my lack of appreciation, but as a consequence of existing in a broken creation populated by a fallen humanity. And I can hold on to the one simple--I don’t know what it is hope? Joy? Faith?--whatever it is, I can find the mode of praising God even in loss and grief, because “praise is the mode of love that always has some element of joy in it” (C. S. Lewis).

I learned long ago that the difference between happy people and unhappy people seemed to be that happy people focus on what their lives are, and unhappy people focus on what their lives are not. Yet, when facing the colossal losses that we all have to experience if we are going to live in this world, it is difficult--sometimes impossible--not to focus on what is not, rather than what is. There’s a gaping hole by what we have lost that all that our lives are cannot fill. Yet, there is God"and if I can look at God as the source of the gift and not as the one who takes it away, God can be the reality that fills that hole, so that I can once again find happiness in all that my life is, even if my life now no longer has her. I can praise God for the gift and not hate God for the loss, and I can do that, I can once more find joy, even in grief.