Dead? Dead.

I spent a lot of yesterday thinking about the way we begin to grieve, the mental process each of us goes through when someone close to us has died.

My wife's boss passed away suddenly and unexpectedly two nights ago. He was a scientist, a writer and a great guy who will be sorely missed. He did so much for her over the years. He looked out for her. He mentored her and kept her career on track. He was always understanding and compassionate, especially in 2007. He valued her abilities and trusted she would get things done.

There was no indication anything was wrong, at least in any short-term sense. My wife had been talking and joking with him the day before at work. He had meetings and travel scheduled. He was there and then, without warning, he was gone.

Sometimes we think it's easier if we know death is coming, if we can prepare ourselves in some way. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, we end up doing the same thing once we hear the news. We remind ourselves it's true. Our friend has died. He's passed away. He won't be coming back to talk to us or joke with us or mentor us anymore. We set the event in our minds, convincing ourselves it’s real, that we've truly experienced it. At least that's what I ended up doing most of yesterday morning. The hardest part of death is accepting that change. It takes effort. Wearying effort. Overcoming any lingering denial is the first stage of grief. It's hard to believe he's gone.

As I heard that thought repeating in my mind, I flashed back to my father dying last year. We'd known his death was coming for months. We were with him and my stepmother at the end, when there was nothing to do but wait, and hope that the morphine brought him some measure of peace as he transitioned from this life into what comes after, whatever that may be. When he closed his eyes for the last time, we still had hours and hours listening to each labored breath, wondering if it was going to be his last. Counting the seconds through each extended pause. Hoping, yet not hoping in a tangled, internal conflict.

When that final breath finally came and went, and seconds stretched toward a minute, the hospice nurse made the call. He's gone, she said, pulling the sheet up over his face. Where there had been only waiting, suddenly everything was set in motion. Tears were shed, hugs gathered. Calls were made and the strangers who handmaiden death began their final preparations. This set up another round of waiting as the necessary people were attending other duties and had to make their way to us.

As we waited once again, just wanting this newest phase to end as quickly as possible so we could all be alone with our still warm grief, my stepmother, my father's truest love in this life, kept walking over to the hospital bed on which my father's body rested in the living room. She would pull back the sheet and look at this face, then turn to me or Karen with a simple question. Dead? We'd repeat it back to her, nodding in confirmation. Dead. She did this several times before the mortician arrived, always the same question in her voice and eye. Dead? We nodded back solemnly in reply. Dead. 

A word of explanation. Twelve years earlier, my stepmother had suffered an aneurysm. She was lucky to survive. She went through several rounds of surgery, each taking just a little bit more from her, at least to the casual observer. She had trouble forming long-term memories. Despite all the therapy, she never recovered much of her speech. Words came hard for her. You could see the ideas and memories locked inside with only narrow passages of escape. And those, sometimes confused or disassociated, at the end of a torturous maze. Where she had always been what you'd call a direct person, she became less discreet, sometimes brutally so, as each word emerged into from its ordeal to gain its freedom.

Dead? Dead.

Each time, she folded the sheet gently back over him and resettled in her chair. Where she'd stare at his covered body as she struggled to accept her new reality. Until she was compelled to return, to lift the sheet again, and verify the memory was real.

Dead? Dead.

As Karen and I grappled with our own feelings, this was very strange. Throughout the time we'd spent with my stepmother leading up to my father's death, the hospice nurses expressed deep concern that she wasn't really processing what was going on, and perhaps wasn't capable of processing it. While I shared some of their concern, I knew there was more of her locked inside than might be visible to the eye, trained or otherwise. I could see it flickering like a candle in the quiet moments. She was going through exactly what the rest of us were going through, only slower.

Dead? Dead.

By the time the mortician came to claim my father's body, my stepmother didn't need to look at him again. By the next morning, she had fully accepted the change, perhaps better than the rest of us. She went about her routine in a pragmatic way only the very old can. She knew my father was gone. She didn't feel the need to mention him again.

Some people might think that experience was a bit surreal. At the time it was, though now I see it differently. My stepmother had stripped away any pretense or social niceties and laid bare the most basic of human rituals. She didn't use any of the euphemisms to soften the situation. No passed on, passed away or passed over. No other side, no heaven, no he's in a better place. With her limited vocabulary, she confronted my father’s death head on without flinching, as so few of us are able to. In that, she had given me a precious gift.

It served me well yesterday as I heard that voice echoing in my head like a mantra until I accepted that Karen's boss was really gone, no matter how hard it was to imagine. This is why we have wakes and open-casket funerals. This why we have viewings. This is why we hold ceremonies. To help usher the dead from our lives. To help us cope with the sudden change and convince ourselves it's real.

When we say rest in peace, it's not just a wish for an afterlife, though that would be a comfort if true. Most of us long to see our beloved dead again, to say the words we'd forgotten or share the joys they've missed. But that statement is more a displaced hope that our psyches settle and accept that is no longer possible in this life. One moment, someone is here and talking, the next they are gone. No matter how long the dying process takes, in hindsight it's the blink of an eye. So we engage in the ritual, each in our own way, to help us move on.

Our words and testaments and memorials are not so much for the dead as for the living. For the others left standing beside us staring into nowhere as they try to understand what just happened. At its primal core, that personal rite of confirmation is no different for each of us no matter how we might disguise it.

Dead? Dead.

Sadly so, my friend. Sadly so. 

© 2013 Edward P. Morgan III