The Truth About Death

I came home yesterday, one week after my mother died, three days after her funeral, and what seemed like a lifetime to my cats. I say home, but it really isn't. This is the house where I have lived for nine years, in the city where I've resided for thirteen years, but home will always be Mom's house. Not the house on Dewey Street, but the house we moved into when I was ten years old. The house on 8th Street. The house my grandpa built. The house where my mom spent the later years of her childhood, in the room that decades later would become my own. The house where my grandma died as my mother held her hand. The house where we spent Thanksgivings and Christmases and birthdays and holidays and just plain, ordinary days. The house on 8th Street is where the real stuff happened. The house on Dewey Street is where my mind travels when I need to escape to somewhere safe. It's where my life was secure, unchanging, and normal.

But what is normal, really? Death is normal. Everyone dies. Everyone who lives long enough has to cope with losing a loved one to death. Death is a welcome escape from suffering into whatever comes next, and an unwanted, life-altering event for those left behind in the world. Before Kenna died, I imagined myself at her bedside, holding her hand and having an emotionally moving, deep conversation before she peacefully slipped away. In reality I got something painful and ugly that I can't even bear to recount here, and I wasn't present when she died. I didn't get my Hollywood ending. I don't think anyone does.


When Mom died it wasn't much different, although the finality of it happened much faster. The family gathered by her bed in the hospital on Friday afternoon. She was in a lot of distress and mostly incoherent, which was incredibly painful for us all, but when we told her we loved her she would look at us with startling clarity and tell us she loved us too. She was present in those brief moments of lucidity. By Saturday morning those moments were gone and it was nothing but pain and cries for help. Thankfully the ugly part gave way to a couple hours of peaceful rest before she was gone. Cheryl and I did get to hold her hands as she left us, but it was more clinical and gut-wrenching than touching, watching the numbers on the machines descend to zero and hearing the medical staff tell us that she was gone.

Fuck Hollywood and their sentimental death scenes. They do nothing to prepare you for what happens to your head and your heart when you watch someone you love take their last breath and the sheer terror you feel when that next breath doesn't come. They do nothing to brace you for the helplessness you feel when nothing more can be done and the anger that sets in afterward. They don't warn you about the constant lump in your throat, the uncontrollable bouts of crying, the seething rage, the emptiness, the vulnerability, the anxiety, and the arduousness of going back to your daily routine when your entire being screams with grief and guilt and panic and what-ifs and whys.

But this is normal, or so it's been said. It didn't feel normal after Kenna died and it doesn't feel normal now. I've talked at length with friends about finding the "new normal" that comes after losing someone you love. I have even blogged about it in relation to Kenna's death when I finally found the beginnings of it. What I didn't write publicly about, only because I couldn't write for almost a year after she was gone, was the process of finding it. I wish I had, because this all feels completely foreign to me even though it's only been three years since Kenna died. Maybe if I'd written about it more extensively I would be able to find some little gem of hope amidst the coal blackness that surrounds me right now.

How on earth did I ever wrap my head around living the rest of my life without my sister? I need to know that, because the thought of living the rest of my life without my mother is overwhelming and seemingly insurmountable. I know it will happen. People do it every day. I did it when Kenna died. But for today, it seems impossible.