I was having a conversation with my wife yesterday, about which word is more heartbreaking: ‘dead’ or ‘died’. She suggested ‘dead’, given its sense of finality. For me, ‘died’ seems much worse, as it evokes a sense of recency; of immediate, raw pain that hasn’t had a chance to kick in yet, let alone subside.
We were travelling back from seeing my aunt and my nana, and we were having the conversation because my uncle has just died, of an unknown liver complication. It was unexpected and sudden. He was only 66.
Over the past few days, I have been trying to make sense of a situation that seems to abhor understanding, that defies any attempt at an explanation that might appeal to fairness. I guess, in part, it’s down to the fact that it’s so ingrained in us to detect patterns in things that are, essentially, random – Klaus Conrad coined the term ‘apophenia’ to describe it in the late 1950s. But some things are just that – random chance – and it’s hard to see how we might ever prepare for them. We were painting the kitchen on Saturday morning, when I looked at my phone and saw that I had a missed call and a voicemail from my aunt. Her message explained, in an amazingly calm and lucid manner, that she had some bad news to tell me, and didn’t want to leave it in a voicemail. As soon as I got it, I called back. The line was engaged. In my mind, I was running over the disaster response scripts that I had been preparing ever since my dad died in 1998. Given my aunt’s tone, logic told me that had to be about my nana, so I summoned up the relevant information file, and started thinking about what was going to happen over the next few minutes, hours, days. When I eventually got through, the news that it was my Uncle completely threw me off-balance. There was no response script for this scenario.
In actual fact, there probably never is anything resembling the scripts I like to believe I’ve got tucked away in my head - when something bad happens so suddenly, there isn’t a quick remedy, no speedy conclusion that you can come to that will help deal with it. Whenever it arrives, I often feel that death has a habit of casting us into uncertainty, to see how we might truly and honestly respond to a situation that presents us with what seems like the most terrible of unknowns. People talk about stages of grief as if there’s a pattern there, that we’ll respond to death or loss in predictable ways. I don’t hold much credence in that idea though – not least because there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that they exist. Everybody responds to bad news differently, obviously. But it’s not like we each fit a certain categorisation of grief; every time something bad happens, we might respond differently. I was reminded of this while reading a beautiful article by Emily Reynolds this week about grief and loss, where she found comfort in focusing on a jigsaw while she was visiting her grandmother for the last time. That need to concentrate on something small – in that case, ironically, an actual pattern – in order to try and help piece together parts of a larger, much bleaker picture.
Facing death this time around, for me the focal point has been a simple, insignificant little fact. My dad died on a Friday night. So too did my granddad, a few years ago. And now, in turn, my uncle has died on a Friday evening. It’s a point that a few family members have remarked upon over the past few days, as though it is anything more than sheer coincidence. I guess, in some way, it helps to make sense of the senselessness of it all. Friday nights are utter bastards, it must be something to do with that. I think it creates a focal point for the anger, frustration and utter sadness to coalesce around, and creates a bit of room in your mind to start processing the next step, whatever that may be.
A simple pattern, emerging out of meaningless information. But one that seems to help, if only for a fleeting moment.
