Over the past few months, I have suffered three personal losses. Three people, first a friend, then a cousin and then last week a dear and devoted business partner.
First a friend in Australia without any prior symptoms – collapsed and died instantly of a massive heart attack. Then a month ago even as the shock of Rob Pledgers tragic death was still rattling inside of me, my cousin collapsed and died in precisely the same way as Rob. Victor was a tender 39, ten years my junior. He had not right to go before me, even though I have no right to presume such rights!
Following Victors death, my wife Ammie made me throw my laptop into the closet, jump onto a plane and go to Rome with her for a week, without plans or aims or any such care in the world, just get away from it all.
However no sooner had we returned, as if to remind us that there is no escape from such cold, cruel realities, a close business partner of ten years, Ken Stewart, (with whom I had established a business) suffered an acute cerebral aneurysm. Once again, there were no symptoms, no headaches, nothing. Just gone.
None of these individuals knew each other. Only one or two people in each of the network of people who knew these men knew any of the people in each otheres network. I am the only thread that connected them and now, sadly the story of their inopportune departure connects them all in my torn heart.
At times like these, our feeble notions of “normality” are stripped naked, revealing the unabashed fragility of natural order.
I find myself thrust again and again through the invisible curtain, into a groundless, airless, nothingness. The dominion of death. The ulimtate reality of all realities. We have all been touched by its raw edge. It is a world we dare not acknowledge, but one that awaits for us all, patiently, relentlessly, effortlessly. A reality so daunting that the very thought of it scurries our senses into a retreat, forcing us to clamber back into the safe clutches of our busy, noisy, perpetually distracted, spiritually dehydrated lives.
The universe of death gets steadily larger and clearer as we grow older. As more of the people we love enter it, it becomes clearer and more vivid until it connects our mutual sadness into a single seamless whole. A reality that connects us all with each other even as it tears us apart. I am in hope that there will come a time when it will not be so hard for me to make such a cold and clear distinction between life and death.
Grief is a universe where logic is reduced to a soft toy. A place where convenience of common sense, of rights and wrongs and roles and rules all melt into thin air. I ache to ‘wake up’ out from such the terrifying place. I dare not be brought face to face so abruptly with my unimportance, imperfection and impermanence. However this is not a hell, but rather a sacred space. It is not a nightmare, grief is not a sleep, it is an awakening. Death is not a sleep. Our grieving of the dead is an uncompromising space where we ache so much from reality that all our truths thaw into pure feeling. This feeling is frightening because it is so real. For sanities sake we retreat from such woes into THIS sane world, this pinch-self-must-be-true pool of logic world where there are enough distractions to keep us occupied.
We ache to return to this dream of order, reason and rationality. When we retreat into this brittle sleep from which we are so rudely awoken, this is the safety into which snuggle so anxiously keeps us warm…we are only on hold until our next awakening, the ultimate one of course, being our own.
"To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
HAMLET, Prince of Denmark
Act III. Scene I
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