Speaking ill of the dead

This summer I stared up at ancient Redwoods in awe, some charred from wildfires, some toppled over, their giant hole-y plant carcasses blocking the path. Out of the rotting tree flesh, all shades of green exploding, ferns and moss and saplings. I thought, ah yes, the circle of life! How profound! Out of decay and death, new things grow. Did you know that some trees can communicate with each other and that dying trees send all their nutrients to other trees close by that are most likely to survive? How fucking magical is this and what a heartrending movie ending scene this would be — the hero tree sacrificing itself for the younger generation. Well, not exactly, the tree is dying anyway, and saying, okay, fine, you guys over there can have the rest of my juice, I won’t be able to use it. Anyway, this is a tangent and also a perfect example of the stories I tell myself about dying and death because I can’t just let it be dying and death. I must ascribe meaning.

We say, if someone dies, they leave a hole. Our language says there is an emptiness, a blackness, a nothing. Because that somehow signifies that those people were important enough to leave an empty space in our lives, our metaphorical hearts. It supposedly is the proof of the intensity of our love, that if a person dies, emptiness in the shape of that person is what demonstrates the meaningfulness of the relationship.

When my mother died, at her funeral, one of her oldest friends came up to me and said now that she died, this freed up space in the universe. That her energy or whatever wasn’t lost but was making room for something else in its place. I turned away and rolled my eyes all the way back into my head.

People act like they know shit about death. I act like I know shit about death. I do not. I know that my mother and father died, both alone, both sick. They were both burned. One’s ashes live underground, one’s ashes live on a shelf. Not live live. But strange that I just accidentally used that word.

One of them left a discernible emptiness in my life and one did not. My father died a little over two years after my mother. They had lived thousands of miles apart for decades at that point but I still think they sort of loved each other. I think my father died because my mother did. Actually, he died because he slowly killed himself deliberately…

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