What They Don’t Tell You About Death

“He passed peacefully in his sleep,” is what we tell our relatives when we inform them of Grandpa’s passing. It’s not not-true. Grandpa did pass away peacefully. But what was left out was the harrowing process of witnessing his life slowly diminish in front of our eyes. No one really talks about that aspect of death: the laboured breathing, the lips and extremities turning purple, the body cleansing itself of all its bowel contents, the vitals so weak that they cannot be measured by machines and therefore the families having to frequently hold a mirror underneath the nose of our loved one to detect their faint breath—or the lack thereof.

People also don’t talk about the intricate procedures that ensued immediately after the person passes. Who do you call to issue a death certificate? Where does the body go before it gets buried or cremated? What if you want a funeral with open-casket? Where do you find a respectful embalmer? Who will be writing the eulogies? What about religious rituals, if there were any?

How do grief-stricken families navigate all this?

And just when you finally made it through all the ceremonies, grief sets in—prodigiously and mercilessly. You start to notice the stark void that the people whom you loved had left behind.

She understood loss and how it leaves a hole in the soul that can never be filled.

Santa Montefiore

I wrote Grandpa’s eulogy on Saturday. As I recounted all the memories we shared, my brain was stuck in a loop. How can I effectively and succinctly encapsulate such love? How can anyone?

During the process of writing, I also reflected again on my own eulogy; as in, how do I want to be remembered? In teaching, we commonly employ Backward Design when we plan our units. (We take a look at all the curricular goals we want to achieve by the end of the year, and backward engineer our lessons to ensure we cover all necessary grounds.) So perhaps because it is already deeply steeped into my thinking process, I live my life by how I want to be remembered at the end of my life.

I want to be remembered as having love well.

What about you? What governs your behaviour and how you best live your life?

We all die. The goal isn’t to live forever, the goal is to create something that will.

– Chuck Palahniuk

Rubicon, Point of No Return

Rubicon, also known as Point of No Return (PNR) was a reference dating way back to Julius Caesar, at River Rubicon, where he had reached a point from which he could only move forward and continue on with his current course.

Rubicon is a notion that is ubiquitous in our daily lives: from aviation, to investment strategies, to the biological markup of who we are (called R points, beyond which “cells are committed to DNA synthesis and they no longer require the extracellular growth factors during the remainder of the cell cycle”). Perhaps the only place where Rubicon does not concretely exist, is in our brain, due to the brain’s neuroplastic nature. However, in order to safeguard our sanity, it is not uncommon for people to set up arbitrary mental Rubicons. For instance, to avoid losing all of myself in a romantic relationship, I would implement Rubicons as a signal to my obstinate self to GIVE UP when things are too far gone, and my heart too far broken. Once I’ve arrived at my designated Rubicon, where I fully accepted and embraced a future without my partner in it, then the relationship would start its imminent countdown to the expiration date.

Oh and, let’s not forget, there is also:
Death—the ultimate Rubicon, the most irrevocable commitment to action.

alea iacta est (“the die is cast”)

Caesar

5 Stages of Grief

Sometimes I forget, for whom I am writing. I catch myself thinking about what people would like to read, about the voice that reads familiar in other blogs, then remember that the purpose of this blog, is to find my voice. I am not writing to please, not writing to be mainstream. I am just writing. Writing for the sake of writing. So here I am.

Tuesday, June

Sitting on my bed alone, I turned my phone on Do Not Disturb, so as to be alone with my thoughts. Silence befell the world. If only I could quiet my mind, too.

I am anxious and have been anxious for over a week now. I know why. It’s circumstantial. This is how my brain processes and reconciles with the imminent passing of my grandma. Except I have ugly old habits associated with anxiety: When anxiety comes flooding, raging, and all-consuming, all I want to do is run. Escape. As far away as possible. Every fibre of my being aches for a new reality, a new beginning. Too bad that’s not how life works. Too bad that’s not how we get over our anxiety, either.

So instead, I sit.
In abject misery, I sit.
Staring into the abyss, I sit.
Amid palpitating heart beat, I sit.
Enveloped in fear and angst, I sit.
I sit. I sit. I sit.
And wait.
Trusting that eventually I will move onto the next stage of Grief, finally arriving at Acceptance.

But until then I can only sit. Sit and wait. Sometimes with eyes wide open, mouth agape. Sometimes overtaken by tears, heart wrenched in a fist.

No body ever said grieving was pretty.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

William Gibson

No place to hide

Dichotomy Between Never and Forever

Lately, my mind has been riddled with the dichotomy between never and forever—both equally immutable, final, inconceivable. Are never and forever both stuck on the Event Horizon, imperceivable to us?

Penrose diagram of the complete, analytically extended Schwarzschild geometry

If I were to be brazenly honest, all these astrophysics and linguistic musings, are just my vain attempts to hide from my restless mind as I process and grapple with the gravity of my grandma’s rapidly deteriorating health, as well as the recent suicide attempt of someone whom I care deeply about.

I’d like to think that, at the end of this never, as in, never seeing my grandma again, somewhere on the other side of the Antihorizon, there is a forever.

The day which we fear as our last is but the birthday of eternity

Seneca