Coping with Death - Memorial Day 2024

Another person from my childhood just died and his cousin sent me a text. That makes four people who have died this month within the circle of my friendship or acquaintance. I think it is natural on Memorial Day to consider all the many wonders of a long life that we who survived have enjoyed, falling in love, having a family, going to college, buying a house, the many many family parties and celebrations we have enjoyed, while those poor young men we remember on Memorial Day, died in the prime of their lives and never got to participate in these celebrations of life. Buy we know there is a price to pay for this long life that we have been given by some mystery of good fortune. We have to say goodbye to so many we have loved, first our parents, and then our friends as they precede us one by one into the great unknown, which might be the great nothing - it is a mystery until we get there and maybe after as well.

So this month, two classmates died, an old teen years friend, and a young man related to my sister through her grandson and I had to send this young man's mother a consolation card though there is no consolationt for a mother who has lost her 42 year old son, as there is none for the two children he left behind. That mother and those children have to go on with the greath sadness inside them, a part of them for the rest of their lives because their loss is, as my grandmother said "unnatural" - children shouldn't lose their father and mother before they grow up and a mother shouldn't outlive her son. But it happens.

We get to live, and we get the reminders of the brevity of our lives and we carry the sorrow of the loss of those we have loved. An old friend of mine, Marguerite, who died in her nineties, once said that everyone she had ever loved had died and she was alone in the world. And it is true. She had new friends, but it isn't the same as the ones who knew your family, and grew up with you, the blood relations who shared the family memories of all the relatives who are gone. Or your lovers, husbands, wives. These can't be replaced.

But our task is to find the good things around us and to carry on even with our burdens, the burdens of the great good fortune of a long life: disability, fear, the deaths of our loved ones. We can't stay too long in the shadow of sorrow because we are wasting the great good fortune of the days that have been given to us to enjoy in this wonder filled life we have now, in this world. So we have to pay our respects, shed our tears, share our memories and move on into another day, another week, another year, perhaps another loss, and for certain, another joy and wonder. To paraphrase something the Dalai Llama said, we can't get over some things, but we must not let them pull us down. Just as age weakens us, we have to find the strength to carry on.

My love goes out to all who sorrow - Jo Ann

wrightj45@yahoo.com