Allan Watts (1915-1973) was a British-American writer and self-described "philosopher entertainer". Steeped in multiple Eastern religious traditions and philosophies, he offers us these words to meditate on when considering life after death:
“[T]he anxiety-laden problem of what will happen to me when I die is, after all, like asking what happens to my fist when I open my hand, or where my lap goes when I stand up.”
For those of you who might not be familiar, the 2020 American movie Nomadland tells the story of Fern (played by actress Frances McDormand). Fern and her husband had spent many years working in a factory in the town of Empire, Nevada. But then everything falls apart for Fern: the factory shuts down, the town becomes mostly abandoned, her husband dies. Fern packs her remaining possessions into a van and travels around the country doing seasonal jobs.
In a particularly emotional and poignant scene, Fern meets up with another nomad, Bob Wells, who shares his real-life story about the tragic loss of his son. Bob sympathizes with Fern and tells her that there really are "no final goodbyes" in life:
Sometimes you get profound insights from ordinary people asking ordinary questions. One Reddit user asks the question: "When does the grief from a loved one actually start getting better?" The top responder gave this answer:
"A lot of people find this comment that [another Reddit user] wrote on a thread a few years ago to be helpful when dealing with grief. Hope it helps you:
'Alright, here goes. I'm old. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not. I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents.
I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love...
As for grief, you'll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you're drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's some physical thing. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.
In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything...and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.
Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you'll come out.
Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come. And you'll survive them too. If you're lucky, you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.'"
And some of us have endured tons of loss over the years. Another user gave a reply in that same thread:
"You said it perfectly. I lost my dad in 2010, mom 2012, daughter 2016, son 2020, and my husband of 51 years December 18, 2022. The waves keep coming, but you do ride them out. It takes time for sure. Some days it seems hard to breathe."
I hope all of you reading this had a good holiday season and a good New Year. If you're grieving, I hope you will find it easier to breathe, even if the waves are crashing around you. Looking forward to being with you and posting more here in 2025!
I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, so many of the upcoming posts will have a similar theme. On that note...
I was listening to another episode of Anderson Cooper's "All There Is" podcast, where Cooper was interviewing fellow journalist Andrew Sullivan. I was particularly struck by Sullivan's words as he reflected on the passing of his parents:
"...we should not become obsessed with what we've lost because you've got to live and life is right there in front of you. And the whole point of surviving [the death of my mother] was to live. And they would not want you to sit around moping forever. They wouldn't. They really wouldn't."
Sullivan then offered a pointed critique of the way we deal with death in society:
"It is an extraordinary ordeal to be a conscious being and know that you will disappear, die and leave, and the other people around you will leave and you'll never get them back. Suffering reveals the way things really are. This is how suffering works. It sometimes takes trauma to get there. Like we keep this at the margins. Always. We even put old people away. It is all a part of the denial of death that our culture has incredibly successfully achieved. And we've developed health care and comforts and wealth in ways that insulate us completely from all of this. It's not healthy. It is not healthy to keep death and loss at bay in this kind of happy, upbeat, consumerist [society]...[where] you've got to look as beautiful and as young as possible. You've got to earn as much money as you can. You've got to be as famous as you want to be...and that will make you happy. And then, you know, and then that's why I think in our culture, when grief happens to you, you're so sideswiped. This isn't supposed to happen."
Excellent insights throughout this episode. You can listen to it here.
Thomas Edison may not have succeeded in developing a device to talk to the deceased , but that hasn't stopped others from trying. One o...
