Death Becomes Her

Death Becomes Her:

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

George Orwell

So in the recent weeks prior to my writing this essay, I lost an Auntie very suddenly. I’ve been dealing with the event, and the funeral, since first hearing the news. Death, particularly when it occurs to someone you’ve known either intimately or for a long period of your life, can be hard to process and rationalise. I say either because not every person in your life that dies will be someone who has a complete role, or one that is a defining part of you. This is not a revelatory comment I’m sure you will agree and I’m willing to wager that pretty much every person reading this has experienced the death of someone close to them before.

If a death comes about very suddenly it can be difficult to even readjust to the realisation that it’s happened, let alone come to terms with it. Often we can feel like being told of it is a sick joke as we don’t register that people can, and often do, die without any graceful or determined end. I’m sure we’d all love the cinematic ending where we get to say something poignant in the last moments of life but how often is that actually the case? When there is an ongoing illness you can try and prepare yourself for it with more time to process even if it doesn’t make the grieving any easier.

In relation to my Auntie there was no series of events where I heard she was in hospital frequently with me fearing that it would be her last day. That isn’t to say that she wasn’t in hospital often… I genuinely didn’t know. She may well have been in hospital every week and I didn’t know about it with the information simply not being passed on to me and my not having sought it out. Even if that is the case, it does not change the lived experience I’m going to write about.

When I was told about my Auntie having passed, I woke up on a Saturday morning after a night of drinking and playing Final Fantasy XV to a phone call from my dad giving me the news. If you’re reading this essay and hoping that this is a piece to honour my Auntie by way of a literary tribute proclaiming the good that she’s had in my life… I suggest you stop here and go about your day. I’m a pessimist and write the way I think. Despite my misleadingly optimistic demeanour you’re not going to get that kind of piece from me.

My Auntie isn’t a member of the family that I’ve been particular close to for quite some time but the death was still a shock and impacted my general mental health after the news. The first emotion that I felt though was not sadness or even that general feeling of emptiness that my depression normally afflicts me with: it was anger. Anger at my Auntie and anger at myself.

The state of my mental health has been weak for some time now and despite the multiple events that have occurred over the last few months of my life, this was the event that got me to reflect on a lot of my actions and behaviours. This piece is for me to vent what’s going on in my mind so that it’s coming out in a coherent manner instead of after a few bottles of Thatcher’s. I hope this piece helps you to realise that if you’ve ever felt anything other than sadness following the death of a family member, you’re not necessarily wrong to feel that way. Death and the human condition is a funny thing and we should be able to discuss and question it.

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive.”

Bertrand Russell

The Time is Never Right

“One should die proudly when it is no longer possible to live proudly.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Like I’ve said, my Auntie and weren’t too close in her final years. If you dial the clock back by about 10 to 15 years she was the cool Auntie with plenty of attitude, but she knew exactly who she wanted to be. She was the Auntie that bought me the Harry Potter books immediately after hearing how much I loved the first film (the four that had been released at the time at least); she was the one who hung out with us kids when a lot of the family was socialising at the pub on holiday; she always had a sassy comment at the ready to bring life into the room. She was also well liked and a typical Yorkshire lass, even at one point making it into the local paper for a heroic act of defence. Like any family member you learn more and more stories the older you get and while there were definitely some less than flattering stories that occurred in those previous years, they didn’t change my overall perception of her.

Things changed after her father died. Whether that was the cause of her decline is something I’m not qualified to comment on and I don’t want to needlessly speculate. About 5 or 6 years after we lost my grandad, she quickly got a reputation for asking for money at every opportunity, lying about her circumstances and being known to a pub as a usual that she denied frequenting. For the last few years of her life she embodied every bad thing about Britain that I’ve ever considered. Can work and refuses to but then proclaims immigrants are stealing jobs? Blames everything except herself for the problems she believes she faces? Uses the deaths of family members as excuses for bad behaviour? Yeah, not someone I could respect.

When her mother died as well I saw her at the funeral which was my first contact with her in probably a year. I hadn’t made a conscious effort to not see her mind you, I was busy with things in my own life including a busy schedule with work and volunteering. Let me put it another way. Towards the beginning of this rambling essay I mentioned that I’d been playing FFXV when I heard the news. As someone who enjoys an evening with a pint of cider and a PS4 controller in hand, this was how I was typically spending my non-working hours. Over the last month when I’d thought more about Noctis, Ignis, Prompto and Gladiolus than I had my Auntie.

What I saw at the funeral was not the image of my Auntie I had previously known… she was losing her hair and having to use a wheelchair because of the damage she had done to her. Was it due to binge drinking and potential other drugs? I don’t know, I’m not a doctor. Considering my own alcohol intake I was not one to criticise someone else’s drinking either. That was one thing, but the last image of her I will ever have from when she was alive is declaring that she won’t be having a single drink (in the same place that I’ll be attending her wake soon) and less than an hour later having to be carried away because she had drunk so much so quickly and was vomiting all over herself at my Grandma’s wake. I was seeing my favourite band perform live in York with a very good friend that evening so we naturally had different way of the grief.

I bring all this up because the evening after I had discovered this I had a lengthy chat with my sister we struggled to think of the recent happy memories. I’ll get into this more a bit later, but for now I’ll say that there is no right time for death in the family to come about and trying to rationalise it as all part of one big plan may work for some… but not me.

“Death was far more certain than God.”

Graham Greene

Heavenly Thoughts:

“You cannot change what you are, only what you do.”

Philip Pullman

I’ve never been a practicing religious person. The times that I attended Church on a Sunday when I was younger were always through Cubs/Beavers, and the only time that I prayed for anything was when I saw it as a last resort. When my Grandad was taken into hospital when I was about 16 I did pray, begging for God to prove himself and spare my beloved family member. I know that isn’t how prayer is supposed to work but when you’re desperate for something to happen you’ll try anything. It got me thinking about the way people, even atheists, allow God into their lives when something like this happens. For example, people say that when people pass away that you should only focus on the good. I have no intention of railing against my Auntie for the rest of my life, but I’m also not going to praise her as a perfect soul whose death will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Despite a keen interest in theology, I’m an atheist: I don’t believe in Heaven, Hell or any kind of afterlife. One of the things you often get assured of by a lot of people is “you know they’re up there looking down happily” which is a sentiment I appreciate but I have to often disregard. I know people are saying it to assure you that the people who have passed on aren’t suffering, but if I’m someone who doesn’t believe in a Deity and therefore acts as if there isn’t one, it’s rather hypocritical to act as if there is a heavenly place where the dead can spend eternity in pure happiness. I’d fall victim to the same selective approach to religious teachings that I often accuse theists of when there are scriptural defences of banning gay marriage. That being said if there is a good place for us to go to after we pass away, I’d love to go if for nothing else than to teach my grandparents to drink properly.

In the process of drafting this I found myself reading C. S. Lewis’s The Problem of Pain which has actually helped me come to terms with the issues of bereavement in the family and understanding how some people see death. It’s not helped me find faith again by any means and I’ve major problems with the book (it’s intellectually dishonest at times), but it’s assured me that even Christians aren’t entirely sure of what God’s plan. “Finding your own good” is a suggestion as to what God wills us to do despite his insistence of certain things being prohibited elsewhere in the Bible. Even those who literally have God on their side telling them why some people suffer and die in ways we deem unfair can’t explain it. Believer or not, none of us know for sure what happens after we die. We can hope of course, and a lot of our hope comes in how we act when mourning.

Nobody likes a funeral and my Auntie’s was the fourth time I’d attended the same Crematorium in the last five years. During the funeral there were of course readings from the books of Isaiah, as well as stories shared about my Auntie over the years. What I noticed was that instead of putting forward anything about how she has lived the last decade, the most recent event was something that happened in 2004. It’s so easy to ignore the bad and look at the past with rose tinted glasses. I know it’s standard funeral speak but one of the things that bugged me was the declaration that my Auntie “gave her life and walked in the light of Jesus Christ”. I know that that this is standard wording of a funeral but it’s also inaccurate to suggest that my Auntie was a practicing theist.

I didn’t pray during the funeral. I did not actively partake in the religious aspects of the funeral. I know the Lord’s Prayer, but I remained silent. I knew when to say amen, and again I remained silent. I’ve always thought that if there is a God and he saw me, he’d rather me not pretend to have faith in him a la Pascal’s Wager. Partaking in celebration of him, and the apparent “close bond” he had with my Auntie is not something I thought was appropriate.

“We lie best when we lie to ourselves.”

Stephen King

Actual Life After Death:

“But we know that people are complicated and have a mixture of flaws and talents and sins. So why do we pretend that we don’t?”

Jon Ronson

I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that I am angry at myself. I spoke with my sister on the phone that evening and we both struggled to think of the last time that we had said anything positive about her. My earlier description about how she was the epitome of what I didn’t like about modern society? That’s been my mindset for a long time. It was accurate when I last saw her and all the times she’s been brought up in conversations about her. This is why I was so annoyed at myself: despite my recalling some great memories with my Auntie, the ones that are going to last are the worst parts of her. She may have improved following Grandma’s funeral… but I did nothing to see her again to see if that was the case.

When people die you often have regrets about things you said or conversations that you wished you had had. For me, I will live with the fact that I saw worst parts of my Auntie and didn’t try hard enough to fix it. For all my talks of being Egalitarian, I generally see the worst in people and that’s not healthy. But when someone dies are we to let all of the bad things slide and pretend people were someone they were not? I had a wonderful relationship with my Grandad and one of my biggest regrets in life is that I never got the chance to sit down and just talk to him with a tumbler of good whiskey. If he were alive though I have no doubt we would disagree on the vast number of topics. The conversations me and my dad have had regarding Brexit?

If there is any positive to come out of my Auntie’s death it’s a reminder that it’s important to change things whilst you can. What’s worth noting is that I have had two Aunties go through similar issues when it comes to alcohol. The Auntie that I have that is still alive was given a substantial scare to say the very least and effectively told that, if she didn’t change her behaviours when it came to drinking, she’d be dead soon. She did change her behaviours and is a much better person in herself for it. She could very easily have taken the route and chosen to die on her own terms and for everything that she has been able to change, I can do nothing but commend her. Unlike my unfortunately deceased Auntie I am in a position where I can explore a lot of myself through self-reflection. I can see my character flaws that have amplified over the last few years. I can see how my behaviours are affecting the people around me. I can see that using alcohol as a crutch to deal with issues doesn’t deal with the issues and only creates more issues.

This piece is pretty much just a ramble of general musings and thanks to anyone who’s stuck with it. I don’t know what I want people to take away from this. The truth is that I’m not alone in this immediate feeling. In the past week two of my best friends have also lost loved ones and they seem to be going through the same emotions. Their anger is different to mine, with their loved ones being far closer relatives than mine and it not being fair that they have had to pass away so suddenly. Everyone mourns in different ways but for me the thing I want to avoid is falling into hypocrisy. People are flawed and it’s ok to acknowledge that, but when someone dies their flaws don’t disappear. By the same token, a lot of people are incredibly good and there are incredibly joyful times that remind us of the full lives we lead. This doesn’t just extend to people either: I was emotionally hit by the death of my dog to a level some discuss losing a sibling, and I am far from alone in this regard.

It’s best that we learn from the mistakes of those who have passed before us whilst also celebrating life. We need to acknowledge everything, the good and the bad, that has shaped us. We have to keep going in life and

“There are only moments. Live in this one. The happiness of these days.”

Philip Pullman