Still unraveling this. Here's another another essay/eulogy about life, death, love, and music, with a pissed-off beginning and a bittersweetly optimistic ending.
I am realizing that the reason I'm disgusted by my guy-friend's compassionless comment is because it smugly insinuated that one shouldn't feel grief if the person who died was a drinker. As if humans don't deserve respect after death, if they drank.
A little late to pass judgment now...
Grief shaming is never right, but on top of that, he's passing judgment on the deceased, someone he never met. R loved me. He deserves a better eulogy than a flippant critique by someone with a calcified pineal gland.
Alcoholism was R's form of self harm, originating from childhood trauma. He was born because his mom couldn't get an abortion, because cAtHoLiCiSm. He was a byproduct of rape. His dad was a drug addicted pimp, his mother was a deeply traumatized prostitute who hated men, understandably. R was unwanted, abandoned at age 6. He had untreated severe OCD. He had no medical insurance. He lost two family members in two years and couldn't handle grief without alcohol. Context is not hard to understand.
Despite all this, he was nice guy. He made everyone laugh. He cared. He loved giving gifts. Making everyone feel wanted and loved was a core aspect of his personality, probably because he never wanted anyone to feel rejected as he had been as a child. Friends showed up at his door uninvited, and he never turned them away. His drunk friend punched holes in his apartment, yet he always let him back in. His boss stopped paying him, but he still sang karaoke with him every week. I neglected him, but he loved me more than anything on earth. The guy was more forgiving than Jesus.
I too, had assumptions about him because of his origins. But he was kind, and vanilla, not the type you might imagine as the child of a pimp and a prostitute. He wasn't a fuckboy. He was a romantic. He showered me with love. He put me on a pedestal. He was inexperienced at love, but he really wanted it, with me. His adoration felt good, we just had very different ideas about love. He wanted traditional, but I am every lyric of Portishead's Glory Box.
He latched onto me like his mother, another sexually traumatized woman who rejected his love. I was the woman he chose to symbolically unbirth him from this world. I was the conclusion to his narrative about women. Like his mom, I didn't ask for this. I didn't give him the love he craved from me. I was his death-mother.
He once said he only liked women who didn't like him back, and never liked women who liked him. So I guarded my heart, thinking that if I loved him back he might immediately unlove me. I'll never know, because he died before I had a chance to find out.
42 is too young. He left the world as unexpectedly as he was born. I'm grateful for what we had. I miss him.
I've started believing again in an unseen natural order in the universe. When I hum, when I hear music, when I feel feelings or dream, something clicks. He has returned to the stars that made him. He is at peace. He resides forever in me. I was the last person he loved. This tethers his soul to mine for eternity. It's not a small thing to me.
I feel like the Goddess of Death. But aren't all women loathed, loved, and feared for our capacity to choose to create life or terminate it? The Goddess has always been associated with the power to create life, as well as being the portal to the underworld, afterlife, heavens, etc.. The womb is a powerful thing. Life and birth has an inextricable shadow side. But is it really a "shadow"? Or just a birth in reverse?
I keep imagining the roots of a tree that we can't see, but they're there, alive and connected to the living tree. The nutrients of death feed the living tree. The branches grow above as a mirror to the underworld branches that reach into the darkness of millenia of buried souls. He is on the other side of this tree. Death is in a symbiotic relationship with life. Regardless of which side of ground level we are on, everything is infinitely connected.
We are stardust. Love is infinite. My grief is merely the selfish desire to keep everything in my simplistic material sight. His physical body is gone from my personal range of vision, his voice, his liver, his bodily functions, gone. His suffering is gone. But he's clear as day in my mind, alive as ever in a realm that our tiny brains are incapable of comprehending, beyond physical perception.
Funny that a dead atheist should elicit something akin to "faith" in me. But he did comically choose to sing George Michael's "Faith" every time we karaoke'd. We sang it together. I leaned my head on his tall shoulder and we sang it with conviction, laughing, singing breathily, colored lights dancing across our drunk faces. Now that memory feels like a message from beyond. George Michael suddenly feels less corny! Now our joke song is imbued with meaning. A death hymn fitting for someone who had a great sense humor. I hear R singing it to me, holding my hand through grief, and I'm hanging on every word.
"Baby, I know you're askin' me to stay
Say "Please, please, please don't go away
You say I'm givin' you the blues
Maybe you mean every word you say
Can't help but think of yesterday...
But I gotta have faith
I gotta have faith
I gotta have faith, faith, faith
I gotta have faith, faith, faith."
I gotta have faith too -- and not in the Christian sense. I must learn to have faith in life, faith in love, and faith in death. Faith that everything will be okay. Faith is irrationally optimistic, and sometimes it's all we have left when everything else is gone. But when someone from beyond the grave gives you an earworm, you listen. Because, faith. Faith is the difference between survival and giving up in despair. Between the two, I'll choose faith. Even if I have to sing the goddamn song alone now. If I have faith and turn out to be wrong, so what? I'd rather believe in something meaningful and soul-nourishing than believe in nothing at all. Both are a biased belief anyway, so I'll choose the fun one, the one that views life as an expansive magical adventure of infinite spiritual interconnection. Why not? Faith, faith, faith...
One day I will return to my hometown and sing the shit out of every song we sang together, in that same hole-in-the-wall bowling alley where we sang all our blues away. Maybe when spring comes... Maybe his friends will join me, and together we will remember and be grateful for those happy times we shared, tears streaming down our cheeks as we fumble, just as he did, to have faith in life in the face of suffering.
9:34 a.m. - 2022-11-20