I grew up in a family that didn’t engage in a lot of emotional expression. One didn’t put one’s feelings on public display. It was considered self-indulgent maybe. I am making a conscious decision – as awkward as it feels, as it will always feel – to express feelings. I think it does us good to know sometimes we’re not alone in what we’re feeling. I think it’s healthy – so here, here are some feelings.
I am a fan of Anthony Bourdain and this is a love letter but not to him, but to those who try to cope with such losses.
His death leaves a void that won’t be filled.
Every life has its unique shape. Every interior world is a vast and infinite universe that flickers from view when that life leaves.
Bourdain, as an example, lived a life I envied. He travelled. He consumed life. His prose was beautiful. He seemed younger than his years. He had a daughter and people who loved him. He had a voice in the world.
I think about his leaving. It is a way of dying we are seeing too much these days.
Suicide is a particularly troubling end because in it we imagine there were choices.
I find it problematic when people, in an effort to express compassion or empathy, reduce the circumstances of depression to an illness or some other unnuanced thing. I think one small part of why some shy away from the label of “mental illness,” is its lack of complexity in explaining a condition. It flattens the nuance of deeply felt lives.
- But this is not even a small part of what I’m trying to say. I want to offer some small insight – if I have any, to tell you something that is hard to tell and probably not always true but here goes …
In depression thinking becomes distorted. It often comes on so gradually that it’s difficult to see this distorted thinking as “abnormal.” Everything, every experience, becomes filtered. Someone looks at you and you know they are judging you. Everything, everything, becomes so so dark. Anxiety – that crushing feeling that you’re coming up short, and even the smallest of things becomes insurmountable. It is impossible to imagine if you’ve never been in it. Depression telescopes vision. It drills everything down to a persistent, leaden drone that flushes out any optimism, hope, or self-love. Suicide is an intrusive thought that sometimes seeps in like poison. Like the “truth” that seems so evident in the other intrusive negative thoughts/feelings, it is unassailable, you do not stop to question its logic. It is very very difficult for the person having this experience to interrupt it and step outside of it. There’s not even energy enough to resist it. It is a darkness that seems infinite. The only objective is to end it.
I don’t want to give the impression that it’s a hopeless situation – just that once one is in the throes of deep depression, suicidal depression, it is difficult to interrupt. It is during the times between depressions that the best defenses can be built. It is during the light times that one must build fortresses against this threat. It is always one day at a time - It is always a contract with the self to remember that there is joy and contentment and productivity in the world even when one cannot feel these things. It is the intellectual self that this pact must be made with. It is the intellectual self that must be trained up in the lighter times so it can help guide you through the sometimes darkness –
Sometimes best efforts fail. Sometimes the conditions that lead us to these places go unrecognized and it is confusing for those left behind. How do you understand? How do you make sense of this kind of leaving?
– I won’t give you my bonafides on this this subject, but I hope you will forgive me, as I offer some unsolicited advice. Take it for what it’s worth –
Try to understand this wasn’t a choice. It was distorted thinking that took hold and couldn’t be dismantled.
Try to understand – people don’t want to die. It’s not in our natures to want to die. We long for death when we are tired and suffering and we cannot see a way forward.
Try to understand – it’s natural to be angry. Anger and grief are expressions of the same gut wrenching feeling. Like children we get angry when we’re frustrated, when the thing, the one, we need the most cannot be reached. Don’t feel guilty for being angry. Be angry. Feel betrayed because they left you. Replay the thousand moments something could have been different. It is the same with every death. It’s just love crying out. I promise we all feel these things when we lose someone we love.
Mourning takes a very long time – the rest of our lives. Mourning will morph and change as it fits into your life. A strange time will come when you can feel joy and grief in the same moment. It will not go away but it will become bearable and then finally a strange and yet familiar companion.
When we lose someone we truly love, whatever the means of that loss, it takes a long time to find a new normal, for that gasping grief to be reformed. Try to be patient with these feelings and yourself. It is a monument to the breadth and scope of the love you feel that the hurt is so deep.
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