On Love, Death and Change
By: Pedro B. Gorman
Tags: Creativity, Music, Death, Life Change, Grieving Process

Throughout the concert, I shed all the tears the frenzied activity and post-mortem bureaucracies had held back. In fact, I cried and laughed like a madman through the majority of her magnanimous four hour show on life, death, loss, doubt, vulnerability, elation, creativity and celebration.

As she put it herself at one point during one of her lovely, explanatory rants:

“If, as an artist, I have any kind of a job, it’s to go into the dark, and make light.”

I met her after the show and we briefly talked about exhaustion, love, loss, coping and release through Art. I told her Dad had passed away a week ago that very day.

Image: mariameyerg @ instagram

We hugged warmly, eyes moist with mutually compassionate grief (she had lost a few people herself in recent years,) and I gifted her a poem I’d written for her, along with the poem I recited at Dad’s funeral, as well as a shard of his favorite selenite crystal.

Image: mariameyerg @ instagram

No, I’m not a stalker; she is a self-professed collector of “things,” especially gifts from her fans.

Only afterwards, walking back to the car, arm-in-arm with my best friend, Maria Meyer, who came to the show with me, did Maria lovingly point out that I’d gotten it wrong — it had actually been twelve days since he had passed, not a week (again, a poetic coincidence: he died on November 12th, and the concert was 12 days later.)

What had happened? I was confused. Was I really that out of sync?

The Relativity of Time

I suppose this manifests differently for each person: for some, time will speed up and we find ourselves shocked as I was; as if we had not done our newly departed enough justice by stopping our frenzied activity to remember them more often.

I have seen others for whom, in the face of bereaved loss, real time seems to disappear — to become an abstract concept — their daily schedule coming to a grinding halt as they slip into a dream-like, mournful catatonia, with a bad case of the past wrapped heavy around limbs, head and heart.

In the clutch of such fog, you might cathartically weep for however long, as each hour feels like months; you will probably — or not, depending on personal temperament — numb yourself with your particular poison (pills, class A’s, booze) as you sit, sifting through mounds of photos and assorted memorabilia and silently scream “how?!” and “why?” at the unresponsive ether; you might not answer calls or even the doorbell for a good while; you will find yourself possibly rejecting your friends’ advances to reach out and help, telling them you’re fine. You may in fact do — by the act of not doing — any number of things, but in this state you almost certainly will do one thing: live exclusively in the Past Conditional tense.

Making Peace with the Past

My dear friend José Joaquim once said:

“Isn’t it odd how one of the smallest words in every language — the conjunction “if” — contains the largest number of regretful, unlived, parallel lives?”

In the Past Conditional frame of mind, you often find yourself thinking “if only I had said/shown/done _____ I wouldn’t feel so guilty.”

Or:

“If only I had been a better carer, more compassionate, he/she would have died in more comfort.”

“What if I had ___?”

“What if she/he had never___?”

The list is endless, and the tearful wielding of the Past Condtional does little else than fan the flames of wounded egos, fed on the human tragedy of miscommunication; or sometimes, the complete lack of it on behalf of both the departed and their survivors.

Us humans and the emotional fortresses we erect for the sake of protection often make way for persistent grief once “the other” is no longer available.

For a brief moment, I nearly fell into that trap, because whenever I happened to miss our appointed visit — usually on Sundays — at the nursing home where he spent the last six months of his life, he would always ask my mother and sister when was I coming, and how was I getting on?

Whenever they relayed this to me, I felt a nauseous pang of guilt.