My dad died on November 21 last year. I thought I would grieve again with some particular intensity on November 21 this year, and not until then. Instead it’s October, and I’m sad all the time. There’s a voice in my head that sounds like it’s coming from someone dressed in a neat black suit. She keeps saying, It’s too early. If you start now, then what? How long do you expect to carry on like this?
My whole life, I have wanted the calendar to tell me what to do. But the calendar has nothing to do with how someone dies, so why should it have anything to do with grief? I didn’t know my father was dying last October. I don’t know if my father knew he was dying. I don’t know if he was dying. I don’t understand how the body dies, or how to interpret frailty. Is weakness the symptom of any number of illnesses or conditions that you can recover from, or is it the sign that there can be no recovery? Can it be one and then suddenly become the other? Was there a particular moment on a particular day, October 1 or October 29 or November 6 or November 20 when it became true that my dad was dying in a way it hadn’t been true the moment before? It may seem strange to harp on this, but it matters to me. I want to have a date other than the date he died that means something. Not the day it happened to us, but the day we knew.
From A Very Easy Death by Simone de Beauvoir, 1964:
‘He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead . . .
But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her tenaciousness ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.
