Personal Musings: Rediscovering Who Our Loved Ones Were

Some time after my mom transitioned from this world, my dad and I found my mom's old iPhone 3S, which she purchased back in 2009.  Unfortunately the charger cables we found for that model were in various degrees of brokenness, and it wasn't until earlier this year where I finally got around to purchasing a replacement cable.  The reason why I did this was that I knew there was information on my mom's old phone that I wanted to retrieve if at all possible.  It's funny how grief works: as time passes, you sometimes feel that your loved ones are slipping away on multiple fronts, and you want to do whatever you can to hold onto whatever is left.

But here's the thing: there are always new things to learn and discover about your loved ones who have died, no matter how long they've been gone.  A few years back -- I believe it was in 2014 -- my mom and dad went to a reunion at a high school where her dad (my grandfather) had served as teacher and principal back in the 1960s.  One of the former students who was at the reunion told my mom how he had ridden a motorcycle to school back then, and that my grandfather had seen him riding in one day and even complimented him on his bike.  It's a minor thing, obviously, but it was an interesting little story that my mom had never heard about her dad, even though he had been gone for over 20 years at that point.

So imagine my surprise when I finally was able to recharge and open up my mom's old iPhone and find out what information lay within -- it's fascinating to discover how much of our lives are on our phones these days!  One running joke that my mom and I played for a long time had to do with comedy writer Dave Barry's punchline: "Which would be a great name for a rock band, by the way."  We took it upon ourselves to come up with creative, strange, funny names for new rock bands.  Some of my mom's ideas for rock band names included: "Cabbage Sundae", "Igloo of Ignorance", and "Morphine Truffles".

My mom always had a way with words.  Fascinated with all things linguistic, she had a whole list on her phone dedicated to collective nouns (who knew that a group of nocturnal birds was "a parliament of owls"?)  She also loved anagrams and had another list for them (rearrange the letters and "Astronomer" becomes "Moon starer").  And then she also had a list of books she wanted to read -- for some reason, she was interested in the Norwegian thriller genre.  Who knew?  As I've learned and continue to learn, our loved ones are never truly gone and in the past -- there are always new things to discover about them and the kind of people they were.

A Handy Guide to Grief

I found this really useful guide to understanding grief on the CoolGuides subreddit on Reddit.  I think at least half the things mentioned in these lists have applied to me at various points in the last 3 years.

Articles Worth Reading: Grief as Shattered Glass

Over at Pscyhe, Joshua Thomas, who is an associate philosophy professor at St John’s University in Queens, New York, published a thought-provoking article last month: "Grief is Not a Process with Five Stages. It is Shattered Glass."  Thomas describes in detail how his mother died at age 75 from pancreatic cancer, in spite of a promising early diagnosis.  A few months later, while preparing dinner, Thomas drops a drinking glass on the floor, shattering it.  He breaks down sobbing as he gets a broom to clean up the mess.  Money quote:

"Puzzled and decentred by this bizarre flare of emotion, I redirected my attention to the task of cleaning the mess so I could resume cooking. A few minutes of focused effort and the broken glass was satisfactorily cleaned – ‘but not completely’, I thought to myself. Can you ever clean up broken glass completely? Spiky slivers that dashed across the countertop may be lurking unobserved, waiting to stab someone innocently setting down the mail or picking up their keys... As the thought crossed my mind, I considered: had my grief taken the same shape as the glass shards?"

Thomas then goes on to use the metaphor of broken glass as how we experience grief: the broken glass scatters everywhere, spilling into multiple areas of our lives.  It can come back and hurt us in times and places when we don't expect it. Like our grief, we wonder if we can ever completely clean up the mess and move on from it. It's a very well-written piece. You can read the full article here.

Living, Dying, and Playing

Leo Flowers is a TEDx speaker, counselor, and stand-up comedian.  He's also the host of "Before You Kill Yourself", a suicide prevention podcast. 

 

In one of his recent episodes, "Play: Reduce pain, pressure and build belonging and purpose," Leo utilizes a quote by Benjamin Franklin:  "We don't stop playing because we grow old.  We grow old because we stop playing."  Leo uses Franklin's saying as a springboard to talk about how so many of us take things in life way too seriously.  He then references Joseph Cambell's book "Myths to Live By", and at one point quotes extensively from the book: 

"There's a curious extremely interesting term in Japanese that refers to a very special manner of polite, aristocratic speech known as 'play language'.....whereby instead of saying to a person, for example, 'I see that you have come to Tokyo', one would express the observation by saying, 'I see that you are playing at being in Tokyo.'  The idea being that the person addressed is in such control of his life and his powers that for him everything is a play, a game.  He is able to enter into life as one would enter into a game, freely and with ease.  And this idea is carried even so far that instead of saying to a person: 'I hear that your father has died', you would say rather: 'I hear that your father has played at dying.'"

Leo then talks about he loves this idea that "we are playing in everything that we do" and offers some of his own insights:

"For so many of us, we struggle with grief, belonging, pain, purpose, pressure, and when we use this type of play language, when we realize that our loved ones are 'playing at dying' or that we are 'playing at traveling' or 'playing at work', it allows us to be a bit more detached, because we are re-framing everything in a playful manner, instead of a high-stakes, all-or-nothing, black or white, world-is-coming-to-an-end kind of language.  This gives us a more resilient attitude..."

All in all, a very wonderful and insightful podcast.  You can listen to the full episode here. The episode is from January 30, 2024.

And if you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, here is a link to national suicide hotlines from around the world.  You do not have to suffer alone!