(Note: I know this is early in the day for a Grieving Room diary, but I unfortunately have somewhere I have to be this evening--but if somebody wants to post a redirect diary closer to the "proper time," I'd be very grateful. I'll try to come back later tonight and respond to comments. Sorry about any confusion!)
Where I live, there is a common saying: "If you don't like the weather in Wisconsin, wait five minutes." My family, over the years, has developed its own jaded version of the saying: "If there hasn't been a death in the family/family friends circle lately, wait two months."
There have been suicides. There have been fires. There have been accidents. There have been unexpected heart failures. What there has not been, most of the time, is time. In my family, death comes suddenly to the people you least expect in ways you could never have imagined--but the people you almost expected to die "at any time" for years linger on.
We have our coping mechanisms, a certain jadedness and irreverence. I don't cry at funerals, but I do sometimes laugh (but only when safely out of earshot). If you think about it, there is a lot of humor in funerals: saying a mass for the man who shunned church like the plague, for example, or getting lost on the way to the cemetery because the hearse driver foolishly decided to take the highway, allowing a large semi milk-truck to cut in in front of you. Or having to seatbelt an urn to the back seat of your car and chauffeur it because nobody else wants anything to do with it. I've found that a dark sense of humor will get you through a lot of rough days--although it's hard to find much to laugh at at night. And after a few weeks or months, the mental scar tissue grows in.
The one thing that I still struggle with, though, is music. I am a very musical and auditory person, and I tend to form strong connections between certain songs and certain people. Generally, that's a good thing--if I really miss somebody while I'm away from home, I can just play the song that reminds me of them. But what if the person dies? Suddenly, the song becomes too painful to hear, at least for me, and that pain never goes away. It's been a decade since my step-uncle's funeral, and I still tear up whenever I hear "Wind Beneath My Wings." I can hear and tell funny stories about my other uncle, five years after his death, without a twinge, but the song "Brown Eyed-Girl" (which he used to sing to my cousin every night) is still guaranteed to make me sob like crazy. As for my grandfather who died eleven months ago, the pain is much rawer, yet the Stan Rogers song "The Field Behind the Plow" gets me much more than, say, my father walking around wearing Grandpa's hat.
Does anybody else have a similar problem with music?
Newcomers: Welcome. "The Grieving Room" is a weekly diary series which provides a place for Kossacks coping with loss to comfort and commune with each other. For other installments in "The Grieving Room" series, click here.