Tag Archives: Death

Keep Your Loved Ones Close

I was talking to a colleague at work the other day, and we were discussing how I never feel able to get enough exercise in a day (my Apple Watch is always telling me to take a ‘brisk 20-minute walk’ at ten o’clock at night). He suggested I go for a walk on my lunch breaks, and I confessed that I used to to that almost daily, some years ago, and that I used to go on these walks with a good friend who passed away a few years ago.

It reminded me that, despite having moved on in my life, past daily sadness and grief, there are still those things that bring back old memories – for better or for worse. In fairness, if I were to go for walks on my lunch again, I would probably feel both glad and sad; sad that he’s no longer with us, and glad because it reminds me of the good times we used to have. We would talk, share feelings, and laugh and joke each time, and it always felt satisfying to share that time with someone close.

In this instance, I’m glad I was able to have this time with a close friend before they died. I think I have very few regrets about him, because I didn’t lose contact, I didn’t forget, and I didn’t walk away, even unintentionally, from that relationship.

There are others I feel worse about.

A while ago, I tried reaching out to an old friend and mentor from my youth, and received a strange auto-reply implying they would be unlikely to respond. It worried me, and for a time afterwards I fretted, wondering what might have been going on.

More recently, I discovered that this friend had undergone brain surgery, and that during the course of the operation something had gone wrong, leaving them almost completely incapacitated. For over 18 months, they’ve been struggling with recovery, their only communication being via family members posting on Twitter on their behalf.

Just today, I received a response to a message I had left back in September, sharing that they were, astonishingly, on the mend – albeit slowly. I wrote them a lengthy email – perhaps overlong, but I have trouble with conciseness – sharing some of my life, and wishing them well.

I can’t overstate how glad I am for this person to still be alive, considering not only what they meant to me, but also what they’ve been through over the last few years. And in the same way I was glad of my contact with my friend who passed away, I know I would have deeply, deeply regretted not staying in touch with this person had things gone worse than they did.

I’m a very out-of-sight-out-of-mind kind of person, and it’s to my detriment, because it means that the people who I care most about – the people I cherish above all others – tend to be forgotten about as soon as I’m not around them every day. I also don’t generally make friends easily, which leaves me wondering if, as I get older, I might not feel terribly alone.

So the lesson for myself, here, is to not lose that contact. Don’t forget about the people who matter to you. Don’t leave those emails unanswered, and if you don’t hear from someone for a few months, reach back out. I say this because I think regret is one of the most difficult things there is to live with, and although life will always carry on regardless, a life filled with regrets is hardly a life at all.

You’ll never regret keeping in contact. You’ll only regret the chances you missed, and only when it’s too late.

I’m Probably Not Going to Do Anything

Once again, the nation is reeling in the wake of a school shooting.

Only we’re not really, because it happened again.

Once again, we send our thoughts and prayers into the ether.

Only it doesn’t quite mean what it used to, because it happened again.

Once again, the left attacks the right for insufficient gun control, and the right attacks the left for not allowing teachers to defend themselves.

Only no one really cares, because it happened again.

And no one pays attention to what matters: children died horrifically violently, and their parents are left with a void in their souls that will never, ever be filled.

How many times have we chanted ’never again’? How many times have we vowed for change – on all sides – only to turn around to see it happen over, and over, and over again. There’s no sadness left; no tears, no fury, no righteous anger at the world that allows this to happen, because it seems that, finally, we’ve just … given up. It won’t change. Children will continue to die in schools, and I predict with 100% certainty that it will happen again before the year is out. Hell, perhaps even before the month is out.

And why am I so certain? Well … probably because I’m not going to do anything about it. I’ll talk about it for a few days, then go back to my life. I’ll read about it in the news for next few weeks, and then it will fade away. Only the families affected will really care for any meaningful amount of time, and if they try to do anything about it, they’ll probably be shut down, targeted, called ’crisis actors’, or even threatened. Only the families will be left with tragedy that you never, ever get over.

Because in this country, we’ve become so incredibly desensitized to it that it outright fails to leave any indelible mark on our collective psyche. The last crisis that I can recall united the nation under mourning was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 – and that was over twenty years ago. Columbine, Parkland, Sandy Hook, and now Ulvade; what does it day that I had to Google one of those, because I remembered it happening but couldn’t remember where? The Wikipedia entry on school shootings – since 2000 alone – is too long to scroll through. It sanitarily describes where the shootings took place, how many were killed and how many were injured, and a rundown of the events themselves. It’s as distant from the horror of a schoolroom massacre as you can get.

This is my reality. This is what I live with every day, week, month and year. I live with the knowledge that well, it’s just going to happen again, and nothing’s ever going to change, so how can I feel anything about it? How can I be upset, when there is so much upset to go around? I have to protect myself in the only way I know how – by tuning it out and pretending it doesn’t affect me.

Until it happens all over again.

Maybe one day – one day – this country will band together to understand that guns do not belong in the hands of civilians. The fear that has been mongered for centuries around violent crime has led to far-too-accessible access to firearms, and it has led to a wide part of the population believing if they don’t have guns, they’ll be at the mercy of ‘bad guys’ who do.

Well, here’s the thing: I would far rather die, defenseless in my own home, than see my own guns used to murder children. I would rather see a small number of civilian deaths occur, isolated and infrequent, than mass shootings take place every single day. It works in England; it works in France. It works in almost every country in the world.

IT CAN WORK HERE.

Except it won’t. It won’t, because politics and people in power will ensure it can’t. So long as there’s money in fear, we will continue to live in fear; fear of the nameless, unknown perpetrator who might enter our homes (and therefore we need our guns), and subsequently our children will live in fear that they might die in school.

I just can’t anymore.

I give up.

I probably won’t do anything, because right now, it feels like there’s nothing to be done.

It’s sad.

Fundamentally Wrong: I Can’t Just Do It If I Choose

One of the deepest and oldest philosophical and psychological debates revolves around the concept of choice and free will. The question of whether we truly have control over our lives is something that comes up across all fields of human reasoning, from whether the universe is pre-determined to play out the way it does, to whether or not there is a god who gives us the perception or reality of choice.

These concepts are so basic that most people find themselves on one side or the other of the debate without really even knowing it, or understanding it. People are brought up with certain beliefs, and many of those beliefs – especially if they reinforce or are reinforced by the events in our lives – become indistinguishable from fact in our minds. The notion of god, or the concepts of organized religion, for example, survive by the very fact that they fit so well into the world-view of most of the world.

My wife, for example, was raised from an early age with the idea that you can do anything you put your mind to. She’s shared stories with my of her father teaching her and reinforcing these concepts, such as using ”elbow-grease” to clean the tub (which turned out, of course, to just be a great deal of physical effort, and not an actual cleaning product, much to her dismay). She learned from this, and it reinforced for her that with enough effort, you can succeed at almost anything. Indeed, her life and career has been largely successful, guided by this and other lessons learned from her youth.

I, on the other hand, was largely raised to believe that I was a success naturally, whether or not I put effort into something or not. I was praised as highly intelligent, as though somehow intelligence was in itself a success, and effort was rarely, if ever, rewarded. For that matter, many of the things I attempted as a child needed little effort, and through intellectualism I was often able to accomplish many great deeds. When I encountered something that I actually struggled with, I would more often than not simply give up, and was allowed to – moving on to something easier to achieve.

Just as much as my wife’s childhood led to her adult outlook on life, I’m sure my own influenced my current state of being, even to the extent of my mental disorders and never-ending depression. That doesn’t mean it’s any easier to break out of, any more than you could convince a life-long Christian that there is no god. But it also leads to conflicts – often between my wife and myself – around the ability to do things, given one’s state of mind.

For example, we had a minor argument the other night around doing the dishes. We had already eaten dinner, and all that was left was to clean up the kitchen. Something that, physically, I am perfectly capably of doing. However, I have been struggling over the past month with a very, very severe depression, and the honest truth is that there are many times when I simply cannot do something.

I said as much to my wife on the night in question, and her response, born partly out of frustration that the house is perpetually a mess and partly, I’m sure, out of frustration that I was behaving in what she saw as a lazy and unproductive manner, was: ”You can if you choose to.”

This is where the conflict sets in, both from our views on the world, our lived experiences, and probably our upbringing. To me, in a state of chronic depression, there is no choice in the matter. I might as well have no arms or legs; the task of washing up after dinner is absolutely impossible. To her, it’s all a question of mental will: if you want to do something enough, you’ll do it.

I mistakenly made a poor, in-the-moment analogy of a physical, chronic illness: I said that by that measure, you could cure yourself of cancer if you chose to. Poor taste, poor analogy, it didn’t go over well, and we kind of got into a minor shouting match.

In hindsight, there are better analogies I can think of; the reason I chose the one I did is simply because people so very often assume that mental illnesses are somehow less than physical ones, or that they shouldn’t stop you from performing in the way that a physical disease might. Instead, I think a better comparison would be trying to lift a boulder: you can ’want’ to all you like, you can ’choose’ to lift it, but if the boulder weighs three tons, you’re not going to be budging it.

It’s so terribly difficult to describe what it’s like to be depressed to the point of incapacitation to someone who’s never experienced it. It feels impossible to convey the weight of emptiness that takes hold of every waking thought, and the way in which it makes even the simplest of tasks insurmountable. When I say I ’can’t’ do the dishes, I don’t mean I’m choosing not to; I mean I literally can’t do it.

Lately, there’ve been a lot of things I can’t do. I realize this must be making me extremely difficult to live with, and the mess I leave behind me, unable to clean up, only makes it worse. For what it’s worth, I do try to minimize my impact, only using dishes when absolutely necessary, and mostly just lying in bed to avoid disrupting the rest of the house. But I can’t live without creating some kind of path, whether it be hair in the shower or dishes in the sink, and I feel awful and guilty for it, but it doesn’t change my ability – or inability – to do anything about it. (By the same token, I am often unable to go to work.)

I appreciate the efforts that the world is taking to liken mental illness to physical illness, inasmuch as trying to get people to take mental disorders seriously. They are just as incapacitating as physical illnesses, and oftentimes just as, if not more, difficult to overcome. But perhaps a better likening might actually be to compare a mental illness to a physical incapability. If you are missing an arm, or weigh 100 pounds, there are certain things you may simply not be able to do – at least not without help. Humans are, of course, adept at overcoming adversity, but there are some things that are impossible to overcome on one’s own, and a mental illness is one of those things.

So when I say I can’t do something, please don’t assume I’m taking an easy path, or being lazy, or simply ’choosing’ not to put in effort. I choose the word ’can’t’ very deliberately; it means what it means.

One day I’ll gain the strength to lift the boulder; for now, I am weak.