We make meaning.
That's one of the beautiful things about humans. No other living thing is blessed/cursed with this imperative, brought on by our species' capacious cranium. And it's profound the degree to which we believe our own constructions and convictions. Overall, in my opinion, there isn't an inherent order or meaning to what happens to us and around us. But we're driven by some deep-seated need to make sense of it all. This can be stunningly beautiful - the soul speaking through our various means of creative expression, e.g., enlightened religious texts, and other such efforts. It also is the source of much of the conflict in the world (c.f. the numerous examples of religious intolerance).
Perhaps it's an American thing, an outgrowth of our core belief in the value of individualism. But I find for myself that the meaning I derive from the events in my life don't easily match any specific doctrine. That is, speaking of religion, no one set of beliefs works for me. Perhaps I'm no different from many people, and really my individualist perspective is shared by many similar individualists (would that be collective individualism??).
Anyway. The point of this is that I've got a lot on my mind, and I've constructed a meaningful narrative about recent events, about which I'm consciously aware of its constructed nature. Oh yeah, and I'm an academic geek for whom nothing is simple. And I'm rather drunk on tasty, yet very astringent, French wine. My purpose here is to tell you a story that means something to me, but it's not meant to be factual in any objective sense. It's a glimpse inside my head.
So, onward.
In the past two months, there have been two deaths in my family - my dad in June, and my grandma (on my mom's side) in July. After my dad's death, but before my grandma passed away, I thought long and hard about what it means to be alive. Basically, there are aspects of it that totally suck. It's entirely unfair. Every relationship you have, everyone you care for, is doomed to end. Either the other person dies or you do (or you both do, in some sort of accident, but let's not go there). An obvious enough observation, yes. But think about it for a moment. How profoundly painful is that? You will lose significant people in your life. It's unavoidable. Totally, deeply unfair.
But what do we do with this? We know this is true. How should we live our lives based on this knowledge? The major religions of the world deal with this very issue, and I have no desire to review all possible approaches to this. Nor do I have any desire to tell you how to think about this. I will step onto my soapbox for just a moment though, because I can't help myself. I don't care what you believe, but you'd better wake up to the fact that you are finite. You're an arrow in flight, and you'd better appreciate each fleeting moment.
Ahem. Anyway, I constructed my own meaningful story relating to the two deaths in my family. I took basically meaningless or coincidental events and combined them with memories and whatever else was in my head, and came up with a narrative that helps me make sense of loss. Here's what happened, and how I interpreted it, in two parts.
My dad and I had a very rocky relationship. I don't want to go into everything, but it's safe to say that he was the most difficult person to deal with in my life. His death left me with a crazy head full of mixed emotions. I didn't want him to die, but in many ways it is a relief for me too. I feel like I can finally move on with my own life, and that's a bit surprising because it never dawned on me before his death that I in some way felt limited or held back. I'm not particularly expressive emotionally, and the mix of emotions related to my dad left me in a rather numb place rather than a position of typical or expected grief. It felt weird.
During his funeral, at the grave site, everyone else was teary-eyed. Not me. Too much in my head to feel that. But in the middle of the ceremony, a freight train passed by, and I remembered something from when I was maybe four years old. My dad took me for a drive up to the rail yards near Minneapolis to watch the trains. I was rabid about them at that point in my life. We (just my dad and I) drove in our family's giant, banana yellow '78 Buick. I hadn't thought about this in years, and it felt very much like a gift at the time.
I was far closer to my grandma, which made that funeral much more difficult. I was definitely relieved that she had finally passed - she had been lingering on for months, and I can't see how it could have been anything other than suffering for her. But still, she's gone. Unfair. Everything was nice for the funeral, and there's nothing worth commenting on.
During my time in Minnesota, I distracted myself by watching the fireflies. We don't have them in Hawaii, and I think they're amazing. I wanted to photograph them, and I had a vision in my head of the photo to take. I wanted to position the camera above a filed full of fireflies, then expose if for a few minutes to get a big green glow. I didn't have time to drive around and find a suitable site, so that was a bit frustrating.
The night after the funeral, I was lying wide awake on an inflated mattress on the floor of my uncle's living room, thinking about my grandma and how much I missed her. Suddenly, the room lit up. A firefly arced across the room, blinking. I've never seen a firefly inside - they're much brighter than they appear outside. I could see everything in the room clearly. Blink-blink-blink! Again, it felt like a gift: Here, poor thing, here's a firefly, it's okay. It brought me back to the moment, and reminded me that I was alive. I can't really explain how this fits into how I see my grandma - not sure how to articulate that - but at the time it felt entirely appropriate. I'm not saying anything literal about what it was, I'm just saying that it was the right event to push me in a meaningful direction emotionally.
What does this all mean? It's meaningful to me because it speaks to me, no more and no less. We make meaning, and thrive on meaningful coincidence. A train and a firefly served as ways of reaching peace in an otherwise chaotic state of mind, and while they would not have the same significance for anyone else, they were deeply moving for me.
***
Addendum:
One further thought about grief, funerals, and whatnot. It seems that much of the effort behind funerals is to assuage grief, and I find this a little puzzling. It seems like we should do anything but. I recognize that part of the point of a funeral is to acknowledge and reaffirm the ties among people who were in the deceased's life, and I know that part of it is a celebration of the life of that person. But I think it sells the event short if that's all there is. The person is gone. Why don't we allow ourselves to feel the loss for what it is? It's totally inconsolable, permanent, final. I want to be inconsolable, at least for a time, to feel the depth of that. After that, the efforts to move forward seem appropriate. I'm not sure if this makes sense, and perhaps this wouldn't be the best for everyone. But I still see value in being fully immersed in emotions, be they positive or negative.
