Mourning

Six Feet Under finale (Warning: spoilers)

I was really touched by this final episode of Six Feet Under in late December 2006, but little did I know how prophetic it would turn out to be for my own life in 2007...

I've once vowed not to bother you any more with my pathetic personal stuff and trivial concerns in this blog, so forgive me if I do one exception here. Or maybe someone going or having gone through a similar situation can relate.

Mourning is a strange thing, which easily seems to turn one into a sort of a zombie, who wanders through that period of sadness in some kind of a haze. Many everyday functions apparently happen as if on some "automatic" level. Then there seem to be some difficulties to concentrate properly on any task at hand. Maybe these are all some sort of symptoms of psyche's inherent self-preservation mechanisms. After all, mind now finds itself overloaded with all kinds of information which under a traumatic situation and duress seems to be partly erased. Or is all this somehow even related to what mentally fragile people go through while under psychosis? (I don't know how scientific all this actually is.) On the other hand, maintaining normal everyday routines seems to be important. One's own life goes on, after all; it has to. Of course, messy family situations can add their own burden to the mourning hard enough in itself. There might even be some fears of own's own survival, even though unrooted and irrational, but not any less hard-hitting in their poignancy. Parties, TV shows, celebrities and other games of lifestyle hedonism one's peers usually occupy their time with seem pointedly trivial now. Culture has a strange ambivalence about death: popular culture is filled with flashy murders, which one consumes every night while munching popcorn, but the drudgery of mundane real-life death of old age, heart failure and cancer remains a taboo, usually surrounded by a troubled silence and pushed away, so they won't bother our illusions of living eternal youthful immortality.