Life has always seemed perfectly arbitrary to me. One only has to step outside onto a patch of grass to understand that (the myriad creatures whose lives we obliterate with every step, the microscopic genocides we host every second we’re alive).
I wouldn’t presume to describe what grief or bereavement are for others. The experience is as personal and idiosyncratic as attraction, love or pleasure: Each a unique phenomena, with its own qualities, problems and means of processing.
For me, grief is a seething cauldron, a deep and slow-burning vat of emotion that bubbles up unexpectedly before dying down again to a familiar simmer. Associations rise unexpectedly from those depths like chunks of meat or bone, recollections of things I didn’t even realise I’d forgotten. Place and setting feature profoundly: Old front gardens and hallways, lost kitchens, bedrooms and dining rooms. All with their own peculiar ethos and poetry; impressions that meant something profound to previous incarnations (who are now little more than ghosts themselves).
The phenomena has been very close to me over the last few years, owing to the loss of first my maternal Grandfather in 2022, then his wife, my Grandmother, late in 2023.
In truth, the bereavement process has been far, far longer, and encompasses more than the loss of them as people in my life:
However expected and inevitable it might be, the loss of Grandparents is a signifier of transition, of time grinding ineluctably forwards: They take with them parts of our childhoods, the grandchildren we will always be in their minds, the grandchildren we remember being. Through their passing, we grow more distant from long-abandoned -but often fondly remembered- selves, and turn our eyes forward, to tomorrow rather than yesterday.
They are monolithic figures in our lives, present from the moment we’re born, absolute in a way even parents often aren’t. When we are very young, they are environmental absolutes: As much part of reality as the sky or sun, and part of us will always believe that, even in the aftermath of their passing.
We don’t just mourn the loss of who they were to us; we mourn for ourselves
The childhoods that race further and further away from us into the past, the ghosts who erode gradually with every passing day, as new experiences and new selves blossom in their places.
For me, the sense of bereavement began long before they came to their final days: The beginning of the end was clearly marked by their moving out of the small council house where they’d lived most of their lives, which was the very temple of childhood itself:
As children, my brother and I would spend weekends there, entire fortnights every Summer holiday, the occasional Christmas and New Year. It was one of the places where we learned to be who we are, shed the putative skins of previous incarnations and emerged new and unknown to ourselves.
That house still stands in my mind, in all of its sensory detail: The central hallway with its photographs and shelves of ornaments, the dining room that smelled perpetually of my Grandmother’s roast dinners, the cold and draughty upstairs that always felt faintly haunted, the back garden where I spent hours lost in my own fantasies and imaginary realms.
Grief: A Deep and Slow Burn
Death is part and parcel of our relationships with such places, with our grandparents themselves: At some point in our development, we learn about death and mortality, and that they apply to us as much as everything else. We learn that our Grandparents are markers of that phenomena, those who are closer to potential ending owing to age and infirmity.
My Grandfather suffered a series of massive heart-attacks in his mid-60s, as a result of which he had an emergency treble-bypass operation. I recall being very young, seeing him sit up in bed in the dark from the upstairs landing, looking grey and sickly even in the second-hand light, calling for my parents downstairs.
Those experiences were my earliest of dealing with death, the anxiety that comes from its closeness, the ineffable horror of loss. As a young child, I still thought I could appeal to reality itself and deny the inevitable with the force of my desperation. I recall begging some nameless, unspoken principle, nature and reality itself to not take him. As a child, I still didn’t understand that reality couldn’t be swayed or shaped by my grief; did not comprehend the random chaos of chance and possibility.
In that particular instance, he survived his brush with death, but it served to educate me in its nature, not to mention the experiences of loss and grief.
I still remember those silent howls into the dark, the calling out beyond God and the Devil -whom I never believed in, even then- to some other, lesser known and knowable entities, forces, phenomena. I think I might’ve even imagined what they were like, how they might manifest, what they might demand.
As is my wont and nature, stories became my means of salvation:
Mythologising the moment, the experience, made it possible to process and understand. Without that, there would only be flailing denials.
It also helped that, as a rapacious reader, I’d already encountered myriad forms of death in fiction (much of what I would learn about life and death, then as now, derived from stories). I’d already experienced grief for fictional characters, in fictional settings. Whilst that only provides an echo, a shadow of the actual experience, it’s nevertheless a useful preparation for the inevitable reality. It allows for the development of context by which to anticipate and process the phenomena. Whilst it’s never, ever easy, that at least makes it easier.
My Grandparent’s house would also provide the setting for my very first experience of actual loss, first-hand grief:
At the age of 7, shortly after our annual Summer fortnight, my Grandfather’s dog, Bracken, passed away. Bracken had been a fixture in our lives, something we’d known and loved since we first started becoming aware of the world. His was the first, the original brush with death, by which all others after would be measured.
I still recall that day so clearly: The latter weeks of the Summer holiday, a deepening dusk. I was ensconced in our old computer room, playing video games on our Commodore Amiga, when my Mom timidly entered to inform me that Bracken had died during an operation to remove a tumour from his back.
That momentary impact, the almost-violence of that revelation. I remember…the taste of it, the shape. A sublime emptiness, nothing. A feeling as of being hollowed out, which lasted several moments before grief and tears welled.
He was the first. For a child already morbidly interested in death (thank the myriad forms of gothic and horror fiction I’d already been exposed to), here was the real deal: The abyss opening, the veil twitching aside. Nothing could have prepared me for the power or profundity of it. Nothing ever will.
And it never gets easier.
We try to tell ourselves we have it set, understand our own reactions. But we never can:
Just as each relationship is its own phenomena, each love, so too is each bereavement. We can never know how a death will affect us, and how different that experience is from day to day.
From the moment my Grandparents moved out of that small council house on Borrowfield Road, Spondon, a long, slow process of bereavement began. For my Grandparents as people, certainly -by that point, I’d come to know them as people and love them in that capacity-, but also for what they represented:
Childhood, a past seeping away far, far too quickly. As a means of holding onto those essential associations, anchoring myself, I made sure to visit that house one last time before they moved out, lingering in every room, the back garden, even the freezing cold, spider-infested outside toilet, conjuring every memory of those spaces, every association I could:
The small back bedroom, that was always mine, a space where I felt safe and whole in a way I rarely have anywhere else. A place where I would spend long hours reading Transformers comics or dog-eared copies of fantasy novels, the latest White Dwarf magazine or conjuring my own fantastical worlds with toys and action figures. A place where the first real stories I ever wrote came to be (back in my early university years, I lived briefly with my Grandparents. It was during this time I wrote the first stories that would comprise Strange Playgrounds, my first short story collection).
I still smell it now, still remember the days and nights spent there.
The living room, with its warmth and perpetually-full fruit bowl and sweet jar, rows of cheap, plaster ornaments, family photographs and soap-operas on the TV. My chair, near the window, beneath the standing lamp. Always a book or comic open in my hands.
The back garden, with its broken paving, weeds rising from beneath, its elevated and declined lawns, a pathway cutting them in two, rabbit hutches in one corner. The games I played out there, in the grass and dirt, hours spent alone, in my own head, with nothing but dreams.
The dining room, with its old-fashioned gas fireplace, metal guards that would get blisteringly hot to the touch. An old rocking chair, the dining table itself dominating the space. Family dinners, especially on Sundays, the smell of which saturated everything. A radio always tuned to local channels playing hits of prior decades.
Spaces that only exist here now, on this page, in this head and heart. Just like the people who so happily inhabited them.
Later, my Grandfather would develop a species of Alzheimers that didn’t rob him of who he was; he was always aware of himself, but stole his vitality and energy and the sincere lust for life that defined him. He grew tired, obliging us to at least begin mourning the loss of him before his physical health began to fail.
When he finally passed, it was a point of sorrow, but also relief. When he proclaimed: “I’m tired” during his 90th birthday celebrations, I saw what he truly meant:
Not: “I’m tired and I want to sleep,” but: “I’m tired of living. I’m tired of being conscious and having to think and feel and deal with day after day.”
Which, it seemed to me then and certainly seems to me now, is absolutely fair enough. 90+ years is more than enough, more than we are made to deal with.
Having seen him on his last day, my own sentiments regarding life and death have become only more certain: Matters of belief to shake the piety of the most zealous. I do not want that for myself, I didn’t want it for him or my Grandmother (who I also saw in her final days):
I believe in dignity above and beyond any arbitrary enshrinement of life in and of itself:
Life is cheap, but dignity is hard-fought for, dearly paid for, throughout our existence. To take it away, or allow it to slowly curdle and seep from us, is an atrocity, a cruelty that marks our cultural infantilism when it comes to mortality.
I do not want that, and it’s not going to happen to me. I do not want to reach that age or condition: Arbitrary days upon arbitrary days, as all I have and am and place value in is stripped away?
No. Thank. You.
As for their loss, it’s one that resonates so much more profoundly than the personal: It’s mythic, vast and significant. They were emblems of another place and time, angels of the past in my own mind (that might as well be a dream).
That dream is gone, now; any physical reality from which it derived turned to dust. But it endures here, as a dream, as poetry. It is a part of my soul, as they are, and the grief is now part of that process, too. Despite what bland, culturally-pervasive lies might insist to get us back to work, to ensure we keep functioning within those essential engines, we don’t ever “get over it” or come to comprehend or accommodate it cleanly: It’s too big, too abstract, and we are too ill-equipped. The process itself is part of the experience of humanity; to be uncertain and surprised at oneself.
Up until entering the crematorium where their funerals were held, I thought I had a handle on my grief, that I’d deal with it privately.
Then, photographs. Then, familiar songs and stories. Associations I hadn’t even realised existed.
And tears. Oh, tears!
I loathe funerals. Nobody exactly enjoys them, but I loathe them conceptually: For my money, they are not how people grieve and do not generally help with grief; they are superficial, prescribed displays, pantomimic expressions we engage in because culture insists we must. I know how I grieve, and it’s alone. Other people do not help, no matter how they might want to. Other people distract and occlude and muddy the waters. I need time, isolation and silence to process the phenomena, as I am doing here, right now, on this page.
Funerals simply pile more stress and obligation and distraction upon people at their most vulnerable moments, often with a cynical, commercial eye.
My Grandparent’s funerals were fine; they were what they themselves wanted. And it was so, so nice seeing so many faces from my past; friends and relatives I hadn’t encountered in many years.
But they did not help. I don’t believe they do for most people. They are ultimately distractions from the intensely personal, on-going and ineffably complex process of grief, which becomes part of us: New chapters in the myths we write of ourselves.
I’m not here writing this in hope of some TV show delusion of “closure” or with any particular end-game in mind. I’m writing this to set it in words, to express some vague idea of the great, fathomless well bubbling inside, that will continue to seethe and swell until the end of my own days.
And that is another unspoken of, powerfully taboo element of grief, is it not?
The reflections it forces regarding our own mortality, what we want from death, what we demand of life. Too often, we’re diverted from that meditation, forcibly steered away from it by a culture that makes it the ultimate taboo. Death is a subject we don’t educate about, we don’t discuss or explore, out of very old, ingrained fears. It’s as though, by invoking it, we might summon it, turn its attention upon us.
And yet, death is a constant; a universal factor that cuts across every abstract or arbitrary boundary humanity is inspired to erect. We are all born, we all die. Those are absolute and inalienable factors of our existence. Yet, we choose to ignore them until they’re imminent, and even then, have an awful tendency to paint and plaster over them with mawkish sentimentality, diversionary stories.
The abyss is so close to all of us, at any given time of our lives.
Death is often as arbitrary as birth; it happens in a second, without warning or regard to notions of purpose, agenda, poetry or ambition. An out of control car mounts the curb and knocks us down, a heretofore unknown genetic factor activates in our sleep, shutting down or respiratory systems. Aneurysms, heart-attacks…even the dystopian aftermath of a pandemic that ravaged societies globally doesn’t move us to consideration of where we’re all heading, that inevitable decline.
For me, the abyss has been a constant since I was a child. Owing to some quirk of brain-chemistry, influence and other, less-definable factors, I’ve been aware of death for longer than most, and intensely fascinated by the phenomena (for better or worse). I’ve never considered that aberrant; it should be something we consider, something we think about in terms of its relation to ourselves. We have no agency; no say or control about coming into the world (a discussion for another time), but we sure as hell should have some say in how we go out of it (not to mention the standards of living we are willing to tolerate).
Life has always seemed perfectly arbitrary to me.
One only has to step outside onto a patch of grass to understand that (the myriad creatures whose lives we obliterate with every step, the microscopic genocides we host every second we’re alive). Dignity and quality of life hold primacy for me over life in and of itself. There are states and standards I am willing to tolerate, and others I am not.
This latter-day straying-to-the-edge-of-the-abyss has certainly spurred some intense personal reflection in that regard:
I do not want what my Grandparents had. They had some say, some agency, over the circumstances of their endings (the funerals etc were already arranged and paid for), which I am grateful for. Yet, they still ended in what I consider states of disgrace: Pain and suffering and loss of dignity that were quietly endured, until the last breaths.
I do not want that, I will not have that. Life In and of itself, life for the sake of life, does not interest me, and seems an ideology of innate indignity.
There are no absolutes here;
no clean-cut or unambiguous solutions. It is part of our struggles as living, conscious entities in this bizarre circus of creation. I don’t pretend to know one way or the other or that my feelings on the matter apply to anyone else. But they are mine.
One of the few areas of existence, I feel, where we are permitted a significant degree of selfishness: This does not belong to anyone else. No one else can even begin to understand our unique experience of it. Trapped inside our own skulls, we reach, we try to communicate, in the hope of connecting and finding some means of better understanding. But then are denied by our ineluctable natures:
In the end, we are alone in these labyrinths, these ineffable nonsensical asylums. Nothing can change that, no matter how we love or are loved, no matter who is with us at the end:
It is ours, that dread, that fear, that pain. And perhaps, finally, that relief.
And we have to come to terms with that while we live, while we’re able to reason and consider. To be delivered into it without that preparation, with no consideration of its inevitability, must be a species of Hell even Dante would’ve quailed at defining.
George Lea is an unfixed oddity that can occasionally be sighted wandering around the UK Midlands. Queer as a very queer thing. Following the publication of his first short story collection, Strange Playgrounds and Essential Atrocities, he found a home amongst Perpetual Motion Machine Publications/Ghoulish Books stable of queer writers with his two-volume short-story collection, Born in Blood.
