Ruminations on death and dying and grief from a former spooky kid and current hospice volunteer

I took a month to write this.

I think the worst thing about the pandemic is the sort of fog that wraps around each memory as time stretched out and lost meaning over the course of a year. Separated from places and people which would otherwise fill in the missing details, memory takes a sort of two-dimensional shape until I'm repeating stories to myself like a mantra. I wonder what I'm getting wrong, or lost. Memories seem sort of warped, like staring down through a muddy lake becoming lost in a haze the deeper down you go. 

Death isn't an emergency, I know I have all the time in the world now, but it sure as hell feels like it in the moment when you first learn. Need to save and document what now seems like insufficient memorabilia before losing track of it. 

I know all these things about what's normal to feel and have an entire network of similarly positioned friends and acquaintances. It feels crass to be so well informed and mentally resilient on the topic of death in a death-avoidant culture where we pretend we're going to live forever. As though avoiding saying "death" can somehow hide us from it. Where nobody says anything because they don't know what to say and are afraid of somehow doing death wrong. 

In the weeks that followed I: 

Ate 20 peanut butter cups.

Was sometimes sober. 

Belted out show tunes while sobbing in the car on the way to bridal appointments. 

Went to bed with a pit in my gut and I woke up with a pit in my gut.

How daunting it is to share who someone was to other people who knew them. Your weird-ass relationship that could only ever be appreciated from inside it. Who would understand from an outside perspective the truth of it? The real grief is in knowing no amount of sharing with others will ever recapture the relationship. 

I had a friend contact me not one week later asking "how much do you care about my mental health right now". My friend, literally at no other point in my life have I cared more. 

I had someone tell me they didn't understand why someone felt "entitled" towards anger while grieving. I've had someone tell me they feel less empathy for someone's feelings over the death of a pet. And then we all wonder why it's so uncomfortable to grieve and why grief happens alone and why no one works in hospice. 

I do not give a shit what you grieve about or how; if only grief were a finite resource. 

I volunteer in hospice because I was driven to by overwhelming psychological guilt and discomfort at the finality of life from a time when death came before being blessed with the resilience to face it head on.  And because I have a very nice dog. And now the same finality drives me towards trying desperately to provide a shred of comfort or consolation to the dying and to the bereaved if I can offer it. 

This Monday I had a rabbi go off about death plans and how young people aren't concerned with them in a mistaken assumption that people under 40 haven't experienced loss, apparently. I have so, so much grace to have not corrected her publicly in the moment--even as I noticed a hard stare from another participant that left me with a lingering suspicion someone else was going through it. 

And yesterday I cleaned up baby bird corpse in the yard. 

Be a fucking mess, have some fucking grace. That's what I'm doing.