On The Subject of Death, Joseph Smith said,
"All men know that they must die. And it is important that we should understand the reasons and causes of our exposure to the vicissitudes of life and of death, and the designs and purposes of God in our coming into the world, our sufferings here, and our departure hence..... It is but reasonable to suppose that
God would reveal something in reference to the matter, and it is a subject we ought to study more than any other. We ought to study it day and night for the world is ignorant in reference to their true condition and relation. If we have any claim on our Heavenly Father for anything it is for knowledge on this important subject "~Joseph Smith
I have decided to follow a Prophets council and do just that, Study death, study it more than any other subject. I might as well, don't you think? After all I am now consumed with thoughts of death. My mind cannot leave the graveyard so to speak. Studying death is the only thing that has brought me a millispec of peace, if you could call it peace. I can't sleep at night so I've taken to reading. In doing so, I have gained more knowledge and a surety as to where Glade is, although I had a good idea long before my life fell off a cliff. I have a good idea as to what he is doing with his newly acquired free time, and how he can part the veil and interact with us here in this mortal sphere! I know so much more now that half of me resides in another realm. Yes, for the best half of me died and I now live in two places. I have often heard it said, "Seeing is Believing." But with the experiences I'm having, I now know who ever coined that phrase was wrong ---they got it backwards! Seeing is not believing..... Believing is seeing! Today I'm coining my own quote, "Believing is Feeling, Believing is Seeing, Believing is Knowing! And don't get me wrong, it doesn't take away my grief, but oh how it blesses me in the darkest depths of it.
"How often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss until this very moment?" I have had nearly seven months of the most intense grieving a human life can bare. I was told I have acute, complicated grief. Look it up. It's a real thing. I travel this lonely road that now feels intensely long and I am a weary traveler. I long for more strength, more endurance, and some measure of relief from the intense hurting. What is peace? Where does it hide? I can scarcely remember it's face or the sound of its solice.
It's been nearly seven months since I left Glade in the ICU overlooking a dull and gray city. I never imagined the car that would pick him up and carry him past my home to a place where he would be prepared for the earth. That is the day I started living my life outside myself. I will never forget that drive home from the hospital on that bleak and mournful day. Dreadful is a suffocating word that barely comes close. Rain fell fast and hard, my face pressed against a window, my gaze fixed on a bleak horizon that must have rolled by, though I didn't notice and I don't recall. I can barely remember how I got from there to here. And where is here? I felt the moist wet stream of water pour down both sides of the window that day, it hasn't stopped.
I barely recognize a lot of the things I'm going through. "I feel so lost" is a sentence I utter numerous times a day. Grief is huge, an entire undiscovered continent. I've never been here before! I need to ask directions at every turn. Since Glade's death I have realized people now refer to me as a widow. I still have to turn around to see who they are talking about when the empty word is uttered. Since Glade died I have met other widows. I've heard from one widow after another. They tell me it's true. You literally can't find your way, it feels nearly impossible!
And what do I recognize as I'm standing in this vast empty continent called grief? I recognize anger when I lose my temper and become unhinged or hysterical at the smallest absurdity. I recognize little things like that as being part of the process, so they're not quite as frightening. Somewhere deep inside my unconscious mind though emotions flow in and out of me like a vicious tide and sometimes I just don't understand it all and it scares me. Every detail of death washes over me like a Waterboarding torture treatment, where they place a cloth over your head and then pour water on it so you feel as if you are drowning. Fear is a real thing and I have felt it grip me in the most frightening way when it feels like I can't breath for days on end because the pain is to intense.
Love however is stronger than death! And there is a communion of spirits that is real and reaches across death. God is real and more than an idea. The limitations of a psychology that ignores spirituality and the importance of humility is real. Some in the world would teach there is no life beyond the grave. They are wrong. I know they are wrong! Like I know my hair is grey before the die, like I know my maiden name, like I know Glade's face and the heartache that stabs clear through me because I can't see it in front of me anymore. My knowledge is sure. It's not contrived it's not thought up. It is truth, it is a proven fact. My faith has deepened as this knowledge has become firm in me, it has depend because of profound experiences that are too sacred to talk about, connections with God and with the man I will always love! Yes we are eternally bound and with that union comes blessings even here and now in this life --- between earth and heaven!
Metastasio said, "If the internal griefs of every man could be read, written on his forehead, how many who now excite envy would appear to be the objects of pity? Since Glade died I have discovered a throng of those who mourn, stories that would make you sit and weep. Death was all around me and I didn't know it. And now I think back on just how incredibly stupid I was.
"Blessings may break from stone," wrote George McKay Brown. "Who knows how. Grief is such a stone. It gives much to the living and slows time that one might find a way to a different relationship with the dead. It fractures time to bring into awareness what is being mourned and why....."
“Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition,” wrote Graham Greene. Grief is at the heart of the human condition. Much is lost with death, but not everything. Life is not let loose of lightly, nor is love. There is grace in death. There is life. —Kay Redfield Jamison, Nothing Was the Same,181–82
"The way we resolve our grief is a process. Timing is everything. What is inappropriate at one time is a lifeline at another. At the beginning, it is necessary for the one who has suffered loss to admit the pain and feel it deeply. I seem to have no problem there! No one can ever resolve grief without doing this. To deny that the experience of death is the experience of the absence of God is a pious lie that disqualifies anything else one might say. But once one admits the reality of the emptiness and despair and meaninglessness of death, one is also ready to admit that there is something else present in the darkness as well. Something that at first seems only a hint of light on the horizon, but in time becomes a warm glow bathing everything: There is also love; there are also happy memories and gratitude; there is also God. A simplistic life based on despair is no more adequate to the human condition than a simplistic life based on rose-colored theology. In the end, only contact with the living God satisfies. —Jefferey J. Newlin, “Standing at the Grave,” in This Incomplete One,ed. Bush, 129
"The language of grief: Pain is a complete sentence. One guttural visceral sound!
When you are stunned and reverberating, gaping at the hole ripped in the universe – language can’t touch that place at all. Poetry might come close. But that howling center, the vast pain – it is, itself, a complete sentence. The black hole of language becomes real! Now clearly, I love words. But there is a remove in words, a distance between the reality in your heart and how to find any word to express it.
You can’t accurately describe your pain in words. You can’t convey how much is changed, or wrong, or shaken or lost. Not so anyone else will get it. Not so anyone else can enter it with you. But that is so often what people want: to know what it’s like to be the soul who mourns. Words are wonderful things, but they are always going to be too small. Too small for grief, too small for love. And being asked to describe it, to put words and names on what is visceral and deep and beyond that front part of the brain – that is not always a kindness.
I know for me, words never stop. Even though I stop speaking them to people for very long periods of time, my mind still has an endless dialogue going on inside my head. Some days I find the best I can do for myself is to spend time in solitude, rather than speaking to humans. I often feel that if I opened my mouth, if I tried to put words to all of this, I would only end up explaining or defending myself. I just couldn’t keep talking that way. Removed from what was real. Watching myself talk to people who have no idea, no clue.
I need to find those places of outer quiet. Those places where no one is there to ask me for words. Those places where no one needs that empty gesture of words formed in some part of my brain. There are days I cannot lift up my head and speak. And yet people ask, "Are you okay?" I want to scream, "NO, I am NOT OKAY? There is no such thing anymore as, okay. It no longer exists. Death has taken it too.
And I’m telling you this, now, so that if you are there, wading up to your neck in grief. If you are there in that stunning silent, howling void of visceral pain where words are stupid and useless and annoying and small, I’m telling you this so that you will know: you are sane. You are normal. This is the deeper place, a place beyond words. When that is where you live, the small words of others are going to grate and chafe. Irritation makes sense. A deep need for the absence of words makes sense. You are pared down. The pain at your core – it is a complete sentence. And any other words just point to that."
Last thought. In the 21st century people took to wearing black arm bands as a symbol of mourning. It was essential to any well-dressed mourner's outfit. In 1961 upon the death of Queen Victoria's beloved husband, Albert, the royal servants were ordered to wear the black crepe armbands for at least eight years. I can see now how wearing black in any form or fashion was a perfect way to tell the world, "I am in mourning." And part of me thinks eight years might not be long enough. But oh how I wish they'd bring back the tradition of wearing black. I go to my closet and black is all that calls to me. I look at any color in my closet and I cannot choose it. My life feels void of color. It doesn't feel pink anymore, or yellow or any other bright vibrant color ---no it feels black, very very black.
