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On death, separation and loss
12 years ago
Warning: this journal will not be funny, witty, uplifting or pleasant to read. It isn't something in expect many people to read; in fact, it will be somewhat self-selecting to whom it's relevant based on who reads it. It won't be well composed or even necessarily well written. It won't work towards its central thesis with any sort of fluency if it arrives at one at all. It will, however, be honest and will tell many of you a lot more about myself than I normally discuss.
I will start with a few notes on where this rambling road will go. It will touch on death, centering somewhat on the death of my grandfather this afternoon. It will meander through an explanation of why I might not react to separation and loss in ways you expect. It will even discuss what it means when I say "I love you" and why it's not something you're ever likely to hear. Without further ado, here goes.
I have always been someone who connects to people with relative ease. My parents remind me on a regular basis that as a young child I used to march right up to strangers, announce my full name (middle included) and proudly tell them how old I was. This was usually followed up by a very frank comment about why I was saying hello. One of our oldest family friends (by my reckoning) tells me I introduced her to the family by an introduction followed immediately by "You have pretty crazy hair!" This remains true; she does. Looking back it doesn't surprise me that I was so eager to meet new people, because there were always so many new people to meet. I was born while my family was living in Lawrence, Massachusetts. When I was 5 months old, we moved to E. Bridgewater and the extended family there, followed shortly by W. Bridgewater and the other half of the family. When just over 1 year old, we settled in Milford, NH, where my sister met one of her first best-friends. I say first best-friends, because by the time I was two we had moved to Busti, NY and within six months to E. Randolph, NY. I was tested for schools in NY, but never attended, because we had moved to Randolph, Vermont shortly a few months before I turned 5. Slightly under three years later, we had finally arrived in Ashburnham, MA, where my family remains to this day in house no. 8 since I was born, though my own time there was brief.
I give that bit of a narrative mostly to say that people have to develop a mechanism to deal with change. Instead of retreating into myself, I learned how to make friends (well more like make old ladies befriend my parents) pretty quickly. Now, so far this can be many peoples' stories. A lot of people have somewhat transient lifestyles as children. So here's where things get a little more interesting.
I lived a year and a half in Ashburnham which was one of the few towns where my ability to meet people utterly failed me. Partly because small-town New England doesn't take well to outsiders at times and partly because Elementary School is full of children who exaggerate the xenophobia of their parents. So when my music teacher gave me an option to get out, I took it. "Out" happened to be a boarding boychoir school 5.5 hours from home, prompting one of the most challenging and most rewarding separations of my life: leaving home at the age of 9. Since then I've spent no more than three months of the year at my parents' residence, and often much less. The real trick to the boychoir school, however, was the trick of always having a positive public face. Over four years there, I performed in excess of 400 concerts, traveled to 35 states and three countries, performed at some of the most notable venues in the US and beyond. And every single concert came with meeting new people, charming them, and then leaving. Often we stayed with host families. Probably close to 100 different families have hosted me for a night, and then we traveled on. And it wasn't just "go there, sleep, leave;" we had to learn to connect with them, have meaningful personal interactions (at least enough to write the requisite thank you card that we sent out in droves at every new town), and then do it all over again the next night.
The boarding school itself was sometimes very similar. High faculty turnover, high student turnover. This continued to various degrees through the high school I attended as well. Imagine, for those of you who've finished it, your college friends. How they shifted and changed every year or even semester as schedules and rotating graduations made people drift. This eventually gets normalized to the point that you select down to a few friends. The loss of others is something you accept and move on from.
Nearly every person in my life is that and it's something I'm honestly okay with.
Even death itself doesn't particularly perturb me. I'm never been one to fear death and it's not something I grew up having much in the way of illusions about. Sure, my family kinda glossed over it when my great-grandmother passed away when I was four. There was only so much they could do in second grade, though, when one of my classmates died in his mother's murder-suicide. The general arbitrariness of it was made abundantly clear my freshman year in college when a recently-made friend of mine just died one night. Sudden Death Syndrome, in case you are unfamiliar, is essentially adult SIDS. No health issues, no substances in the bloodstream that shouldn't have been, no trauma; if she'd been old, they'd have called it death of old age. And I could tell her other friends got upset with me that I didn't seem to be showing any sadness over it, much as I was working to help comfort them. My family was the same way with the passing of my grandmother, the wife of the grandfather who passed today, in wondering why I was fairly clinical about it.
It's not that I don't care about the passing, either of friendship or of life. It's not at all that I'm not coping with it in some way. It's just honestly that grief and sadness isn't my reaction to either, nor do I think that's a bad thing. Odd, yes. But not bad. I don't mourn the loss of friendships, because friendships pass for a reason. I don't feel pity or sadness for the dead, because death is not a frightening or intrinsically saddening thing for me. Instead, I have my moments of reflection, my moments to ask myself if there's anything about the friendship or life that can teach me how better to live my own life, and then let it pass.
It's the letting it pass part that seems to worry people. It's been expressed to me by a close friend who had witnessed this process a couple of times that it made him feel nervous about how I viewed our friendship, and that there was some sort of doomsday clock on how long I would care. And this...this is largely why I am writing this journal to begin with. The idea that I don't care about the friendships and loved ones that pass anymore is one that troubles me deeply because it is one that fundamentally contradicts how I view my relationships with people. My ability to form friendships and let them pass quickly makes those ones that don't pass very important to me. Just because I can let people go, doesn't mean at all that I want to let them go. The friendships I maintain mean second only to family itself. And not dwelling on them isn't not remembering them; I make each one a model for myself so that I can be a better friend down the line.
In all this, there have been 6 people who have been ever constant and form the support I rely on heavily to keep going. They are my parents and my 4 siblings. Through all of the changes and shifting and loss, my family have been the ones I have always gone back to and for whom I am willing to drop everything I'm doing with my life to support in return. And I know they will do the same for me to whatever extent they are able. Whenever I am in serious trouble, their response is always "do you need us to get you home or come there?" even when I know they can't really afford the trip. And I, for my turn, have and will again completely turn around my plans because my family needs me at their side through a variety of difficulties.
I love my family. Through the minor ups and down (and some major upheavals), there has always been a constancy and love of what I recognize is exceptional strength. But that, to me, is love. And until I know that I have the same constancy, the same willingness to set aside all personal minutia to aid in times of crisis, shared mutually between myself an another person, no matter how much affection I may feel at the time, I will not in serious conversation say "I love you."
I know I can come across many different ways, from cold to flighty, because I can be very friendly to a wide variety of people and don't necessarily talk about my own feelings, emotions, motivations or what have you and don't respond with the same sense of attachment that many people expect from an honest friendship. Hopefully this helps me to explain myself. I do honestly care about my friendships; I do seek to be genuine in my interactions; I do restrain myself at times from getting into too much personal involvement until I know that the friendship isn't going to pass quickly.
This amount of self-explanation isn't something I do often, but it's not something I am unwilling to talk about if someone else asks. If there's any part of it you want to talk about more, even if it's just casual conversation about something that I breezed past and you find curious, please do ask.
I'm going to post this now before I decide to delete it all. Forgive the lack of editing.
I will start with a few notes on where this rambling road will go. It will touch on death, centering somewhat on the death of my grandfather this afternoon. It will meander through an explanation of why I might not react to separation and loss in ways you expect. It will even discuss what it means when I say "I love you" and why it's not something you're ever likely to hear. Without further ado, here goes.
I have always been someone who connects to people with relative ease. My parents remind me on a regular basis that as a young child I used to march right up to strangers, announce my full name (middle included) and proudly tell them how old I was. This was usually followed up by a very frank comment about why I was saying hello. One of our oldest family friends (by my reckoning) tells me I introduced her to the family by an introduction followed immediately by "You have pretty crazy hair!" This remains true; she does. Looking back it doesn't surprise me that I was so eager to meet new people, because there were always so many new people to meet. I was born while my family was living in Lawrence, Massachusetts. When I was 5 months old, we moved to E. Bridgewater and the extended family there, followed shortly by W. Bridgewater and the other half of the family. When just over 1 year old, we settled in Milford, NH, where my sister met one of her first best-friends. I say first best-friends, because by the time I was two we had moved to Busti, NY and within six months to E. Randolph, NY. I was tested for schools in NY, but never attended, because we had moved to Randolph, Vermont shortly a few months before I turned 5. Slightly under three years later, we had finally arrived in Ashburnham, MA, where my family remains to this day in house no. 8 since I was born, though my own time there was brief.
I give that bit of a narrative mostly to say that people have to develop a mechanism to deal with change. Instead of retreating into myself, I learned how to make friends (well more like make old ladies befriend my parents) pretty quickly. Now, so far this can be many peoples' stories. A lot of people have somewhat transient lifestyles as children. So here's where things get a little more interesting.
I lived a year and a half in Ashburnham which was one of the few towns where my ability to meet people utterly failed me. Partly because small-town New England doesn't take well to outsiders at times and partly because Elementary School is full of children who exaggerate the xenophobia of their parents. So when my music teacher gave me an option to get out, I took it. "Out" happened to be a boarding boychoir school 5.5 hours from home, prompting one of the most challenging and most rewarding separations of my life: leaving home at the age of 9. Since then I've spent no more than three months of the year at my parents' residence, and often much less. The real trick to the boychoir school, however, was the trick of always having a positive public face. Over four years there, I performed in excess of 400 concerts, traveled to 35 states and three countries, performed at some of the most notable venues in the US and beyond. And every single concert came with meeting new people, charming them, and then leaving. Often we stayed with host families. Probably close to 100 different families have hosted me for a night, and then we traveled on. And it wasn't just "go there, sleep, leave;" we had to learn to connect with them, have meaningful personal interactions (at least enough to write the requisite thank you card that we sent out in droves at every new town), and then do it all over again the next night.
The boarding school itself was sometimes very similar. High faculty turnover, high student turnover. This continued to various degrees through the high school I attended as well. Imagine, for those of you who've finished it, your college friends. How they shifted and changed every year or even semester as schedules and rotating graduations made people drift. This eventually gets normalized to the point that you select down to a few friends. The loss of others is something you accept and move on from.
Nearly every person in my life is that and it's something I'm honestly okay with.
Even death itself doesn't particularly perturb me. I'm never been one to fear death and it's not something I grew up having much in the way of illusions about. Sure, my family kinda glossed over it when my great-grandmother passed away when I was four. There was only so much they could do in second grade, though, when one of my classmates died in his mother's murder-suicide. The general arbitrariness of it was made abundantly clear my freshman year in college when a recently-made friend of mine just died one night. Sudden Death Syndrome, in case you are unfamiliar, is essentially adult SIDS. No health issues, no substances in the bloodstream that shouldn't have been, no trauma; if she'd been old, they'd have called it death of old age. And I could tell her other friends got upset with me that I didn't seem to be showing any sadness over it, much as I was working to help comfort them. My family was the same way with the passing of my grandmother, the wife of the grandfather who passed today, in wondering why I was fairly clinical about it.
It's not that I don't care about the passing, either of friendship or of life. It's not at all that I'm not coping with it in some way. It's just honestly that grief and sadness isn't my reaction to either, nor do I think that's a bad thing. Odd, yes. But not bad. I don't mourn the loss of friendships, because friendships pass for a reason. I don't feel pity or sadness for the dead, because death is not a frightening or intrinsically saddening thing for me. Instead, I have my moments of reflection, my moments to ask myself if there's anything about the friendship or life that can teach me how better to live my own life, and then let it pass.
It's the letting it pass part that seems to worry people. It's been expressed to me by a close friend who had witnessed this process a couple of times that it made him feel nervous about how I viewed our friendship, and that there was some sort of doomsday clock on how long I would care. And this...this is largely why I am writing this journal to begin with. The idea that I don't care about the friendships and loved ones that pass anymore is one that troubles me deeply because it is one that fundamentally contradicts how I view my relationships with people. My ability to form friendships and let them pass quickly makes those ones that don't pass very important to me. Just because I can let people go, doesn't mean at all that I want to let them go. The friendships I maintain mean second only to family itself. And not dwelling on them isn't not remembering them; I make each one a model for myself so that I can be a better friend down the line.
In all this, there have been 6 people who have been ever constant and form the support I rely on heavily to keep going. They are my parents and my 4 siblings. Through all of the changes and shifting and loss, my family have been the ones I have always gone back to and for whom I am willing to drop everything I'm doing with my life to support in return. And I know they will do the same for me to whatever extent they are able. Whenever I am in serious trouble, their response is always "do you need us to get you home or come there?" even when I know they can't really afford the trip. And I, for my turn, have and will again completely turn around my plans because my family needs me at their side through a variety of difficulties.
I love my family. Through the minor ups and down (and some major upheavals), there has always been a constancy and love of what I recognize is exceptional strength. But that, to me, is love. And until I know that I have the same constancy, the same willingness to set aside all personal minutia to aid in times of crisis, shared mutually between myself an another person, no matter how much affection I may feel at the time, I will not in serious conversation say "I love you."
I know I can come across many different ways, from cold to flighty, because I can be very friendly to a wide variety of people and don't necessarily talk about my own feelings, emotions, motivations or what have you and don't respond with the same sense of attachment that many people expect from an honest friendship. Hopefully this helps me to explain myself. I do honestly care about my friendships; I do seek to be genuine in my interactions; I do restrain myself at times from getting into too much personal involvement until I know that the friendship isn't going to pass quickly.
This amount of self-explanation isn't something I do often, but it's not something I am unwilling to talk about if someone else asks. If there's any part of it you want to talk about more, even if it's just casual conversation about something that I breezed past and you find curious, please do ask.
I'm going to post this now before I decide to delete it all. Forgive the lack of editing.
