When a Loved One Dies

It feels as though the world stops. In situations where our loved one suffers from an illness that drains the body of its strength leaving in its path pain and agonizing debilitation, we guiltily pray for death to end the suffering. And then it comes. How could we not be grateful for an end to such misery? But then we undergo a kind of heartrending gratefulness. For those whose loved ones die tragically, instantly, it’s akin to receiving a blow to the whole body, much like being in a car accident where we are not hurt but nevertheless ache from being thrown around like a bag of jellybeans. We walk around numb as though suspended in time.

Death of a close one causes, no, forces us to stop and think and sense to the depths of the soul, to that place where few of us go willingly or consciously. Suddenly we notice people laughing and wonder how on earth they could laugh when our loved one has just passed. We observe that the sky is bluer than we’ve ever seen it. We suddenly hear a cacophony of chirping birds so loud that they are nearly deafening. We smell flowers, exceedingly fragrant flowers, every where we turn. At the beach, the waves crash louder than we’ve ever heard them before and in the mountains, you can hear the hills resonate with a low, melodic hum, as though they are weeping.

What is it about death that causes us to sit up and pay attention to the world around us? In such times of grief are we in fact more sensitive to the sights and sounds around us or does the act of death cause us to halt in our tracks and pay attention to what is always around us but we’re too busy to notice? Or perhaps these perceptions are our loved ones sending a message telling us they reached the other side.

I don’t purport to have the answers to these questions but I pose them as a way to think about how death affects each us and what happens in the immediate aftermath of dying.