There’s nothing like finding out that an old friend plummeted two stories to his death two days before Christmas to really put things into perspective.
The funeral was a deluge of grief and heartache. Such a young and ambitious person reduced to nothingness at the hands of such an unnecessary tragedy seemed the perfect recipe for life-changing enlightenment and personal epiphany. The family ordered a beautifully crafted granite cross headstone by Kline Memorials to serve as a timeless tribute to their loved one.
With each Kleenex that hit the floor and each shoulder cried on, I noticed, in the midst of my compulsive fingernail rubbing and in-shoe toe cracking, that my problem wasn’t that I needed one or the other. It was that I needed neither. My own eyes, a parallel to my unchanged demeanor, were cold and stoic.
Without fail, I’ve been to at least one funeral every year since I was 12 — when I experienced my first tragedy — as if to serve a twisted punishment from God for never being forced to face the hell of one prior.
I remember the first time death shook my previously unbothered earth. In early June 2001, as I slowly awoke to middle school monotony, my mom came into my room, reluctantly composed, and told me through swallowed tears what had happened. Her sister had taken a canoe out onto the bay in Hull, Mass. – my extended family’s home base – for a sunset cruise the night before. Somewhere between the sun’s falling and rising, however, her life ended. She was found washed up on the shore the next morning – drowned. As she was a born-and-bred swimmer and a nearly certified Emergency Medical Technician, today, more than five years later, her death is still inexplicable.
It hit me hard. It’s nearly impossible to keep faith in a God meant to shield you from cruelty when he can seem so brazenly merciless.
Somewhere down the line, however, between Uncle Lokie’s sudden strike of gangrene, Mr. McAdam’s unexplainable liver disease and Mr. Howard’s or Aunt Libby’s heart attack, alongside the car that fell on aspiring mechanic Justin, inside the one that drove Tiare off a cliff or within the one that flipped PJ during basic training, beside Kyle as he helplessly seized, fell into a river and drowned, among the treetops that saw Justin’s plane come crashing down and now, amid the stars that watched as Herbert made his final descent, I was drawn through and worn down by bitterness, denial, anger, depression, vengefulness, sorrow and bargaining until I reached a complete apathy. I had nothing left.
Each person, each heart and each soul were slowly scoured down to a collection of nondescript faces in my timeline of increasing indifference – an onslaught of shadowy façades and lost promise. Death had at some point, when I wasn’t paying attention, sidled into my core and made me numb. It became my own unreasonable backseat driver that pointed out without warning upcoming slick spots and sharp turns , but kept quiet in between them, never giving me the chance to slow down or stop to look through the rearview mirror. I wasn’t healed, my wounds were just slightly less noticeable. I wasn’t stronger, the weakness had just faded. Not fearless, just a little bit less afraid.
I pled for a single pang of guilt for knowing that there is a place, a world apart from my own, in which men wake up each morning to panic and bloodshed, children to fire and shrapnel and both to unyielding heartache – maybe my problems weren’t worthy of the enormity that I made them – but even selfishness was fleeting.
I’ve always confidently considered myself an optimist and am terrified that I’m slowly moving toward a permanent cynicism. Equally concerning is that I fear that there’s no quick fix to my aloofness. You can’t call back upon emotion that was never invested, and there’s no second chance to properly mourn.
Though a poor cliché hardly seems the antidote, I think that there’s some merit to the idea that the only way to regain stability in the face of such perpetual tragedy is to take life for what it is. The solution won’t rise out of a life of lowered expectations, nor will it inversely come from a constant quest for grandeur — searching for purpose and resolve where they simply don’t exist. A balance of appropriate hope and timely realism will, I hope, lead to a freedom from this dispassion.
I have to trust in this narrowed but breathing conviction that everything will balance out — that I will once again grow to see the deceased for the vibrancy and light that their souls once brought to the world and not as merely a composition of expired skin and bone or the current season’s casket décor. Because I owe it to them for giving me reason to contemplate and for still having the chance to pay my respects.
God bless morticians.
Matt Donnelly is a freshman in the College of Communication and is the Associate Editorial Page editor.
