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.

MyDeathSpace

One section of Momus' MySpacecide article deserves further attention:

"Imagine dying for real, dying physically, but lingering on as a digital ghost, a presence on a MySpace page collecting obituaries and tributes. It's already happened to quite a few MySpace users. A website called MyDeathSpace, for instance, collects dead MySpace users' pages. It has over a hundred, and adds more each day."

A virtual graveyard, what a great idea! I have to confess I always check through death announcements from daily papers. It always interests me to see how old people were when they left their mortal coils behind. If a person was very young, it always makes me wonder what was the reason behind his/her demise. Was it a suicide, fatal disease, traffic accident, drug overdose or even a violent death by someone else's hand? You rarely can detect the reason of death from those announcements, and if the person died by his/her own hand, you always have to try to read it between the lines, from the adjoining poems and so on.

I have to admit that when I was younger, I contemplated suicide a lot (a long story why, but let's say it was a typical case of teenage depression of a young person feeling totally misplaced and without worth and meaning, and blaah blaah.), but obviously never got to commit it (about which some people probably feel honestly sorry for now, heh heh). (Seriously, if you ever feel that way, seek help as soon as you can, and think seriously about the amount of pain and guilt you leave to your close ones: you don't want to do that to them.) I don't feel that way any more, obviously (fuck happiness, sometimes you just want to live for the hell of it), and I can be sure that my body will take care of it for me one day, any way. Of course, I'm curious to know how it will eventually happen, and my own guess is that my heart will fail, in one way and other (judging by the amount of heart diseases in our family). Of course it might be cancer (after all I lived in an area which received its share of radiation from Chernobyl nuclear disaster in April 1986), or will involve some sort of vehicle like car, bus, airplane, or spaceship. Or I may be shot down like John Lennon by a deranged "fan", when I'll be rich and famous. There are so many delicious possibilities to exhaust, but I can't really bother about it now; only try to eat (relatively) healthy and do my exercises, despite my chronic lazyitis. At the moment of writing this, I'm not really afraid of dying, I might say; I only worry that all those things that I've planned would never come into fruition if I had to die young.

I always find it curious that death is such a taboo in our culture, something that people want to sweep aside and put out of their view. It's as if the whole culture is based on the illusion that we will all be eternally young and live forever. I remember when my grandma died in December 2001, it was relief that I felt more than sorrow; that the woman, virtually the matriarch of our family, who had been so determined and strong in her heyday was gradually becoming demented and losing her memory, and that she got away before she would be totally unaware of this world and even family members' presence. And when my uncle suddenly died in September 1999 of heart failure at the age of 53 (post-mortem showed that his heart had been so badly deteriorated that he would have have not more than two months to live in any case), what I was feeling was more shocked surprise than sorrow. I hate funerals myself and do my best to avoid them if I can. I can't stand that sight of weeping people, their faces distorted and red of crying, talking platitudes and (outright lies) about the beloved deceased, priests with all their holier-than-thou righteousness and so on. Despite that I've got a (morbid?) curiosity about the subject, which I have often wondered. Anyway, I might die tomorrow hit by a car or live to be over a hundred years old. That's how life is. Anyway and undoubtedly, I'll see you one day on the graveyard. Till then, ta ta!

My death is like
a swinging door
a patient girl who knows the score
whistle for her
and the passing time

My death waits like
a bible truth
at the funeral of my youth
weep loud for that
and the passing time

My death waits like
a witch at night
and surely as our love is bright
let's laugh for us
and the passing time

But whatever is behind the door
there is nothing much to do
angel or devil I don't care
for in front of that door
there is you

My death waits like
a beggar blind
who sees the world with an unlit mind
throw him a dime
for the passing time

My death waits
to allow my friends
a few good times before it ends
let's drink to that
and the passing time

My death waits in
your arms, your thighs
your cool fingers will close my eyes
let's not talk about
the passing time

But whatever is behind the door
there is nothing much to do
angel or devil I don't care
for in front of that door
there is you

My death waits
among the falling leaves
in magicians, mysterious sleeves
rabbits, dogs
and the passing times

My death waits
among the flowers
where the blackish shadow cowers
let's pick lilacs
for the passing time

My death waits in
a double bed
sails of oblivion at my head
pull up the sheets
against the passing time

But whatever is behind the door
there is nothing much to do
angel or devil I don't care
for in front of that door
there is you

- Scott Walker: 'My Death'

(originally by Jacques Brel, English words: Mort Shuman and Eric Blau)

And on a brighter note to conclude this:

Yesterday has come and gone
you've got to try to carry on

- Jim Pembroke: 'Semi-Circle Solitude'