Get It Over With
I wonder how much time would
be before it would be woul before
the hurting would stop hurting, and when
you’d start to think that everything
was okay and that you for no
reason could be happy out of the
blue. I wonder how much time
would have to pass before you got
to that point, where the world
seemed good again and you could just
move on with life and get it over with.
Sometimes I think about the
number of people who I have
cared about and who have turned
around on me and died. It doesn’t
seem fair when you think about
death on those terms, but it is
kind of sad when you think about
it that way. My father’s parents
died when I was younger, and my
brother’s ex-wife died, too. And
I’ve seen friends go off to war,
when I was sure they were
going to die, and they came
back, just fine. And I’ve seen
people that I’ve cared about
become hospitalized after they
were hit by a car. No, I
don’t suppose much of it is
very happy or anything. Well,
death as a rule isn’t very
happy or anything, and no one
likes to think about death, not
their own death or anyone else’s
death, for that matter. So how
do we get to that point, where
the pain from such a potentially
awful experience disappears from
inside you. How many years
does it take for that pain to be
acknowledged before it can
be forgotten so everything can be better?
I asked my mother today when
someone I cared about died, I
mean, what time of year did he die?
You see, I couldn’t remember being
sad because he was dead or
anything, and I couldn’t think
of what time of year it had
happened. And my mother seemed
shocked by my question, and she
responded by saying, “he’s not
dead.” And then it all came back
to me, that he didn’t die, that he was fine.
After I had that discussion with
my mother, it had occurred to me
that I should have mourned him,
that I should have been sad. that
no one seemed to miss me. It
occurred to me then that I was
missing a huge void in my life,
and that I didn’t know how to
fill in all the gaps in my life that
I was starting to feel and just
starting to miss.
I only have another 60 years of
this feeling in my life to go, if
all goes according to plan.
I sometimes think about all
of the times in my life where
I have missed something that
should have been important,
something that could have made
me laugh. Those moments come all
too frequently, sometimes.
Sometimes you just forget life,
what you’re living life for,
and life passes you by and you
feel like you’ve got nothing
to show for all the years
that you’ve lived that you can’t
remember. I wonder how many people
that happens to, unexpectedly.
Today I thought of someone who
died recently, and I thought
that it would be nice if they
just came up to me and made
an effort to surprise me and
they tried to come up with
conversation and they tried
to make me laugh. And after I had
thought about that for a moment
I thought, wait, he’s dead, he’s
not going to do what he used
to do, and I’m going to have to remember
him this way. I didn’t like that
idea at all, come to think of it.
I wanted him to just be him,
and I wanted him to crack a joke
and make me laugh and be his
usual self.
I think my problem is that I just
don’t want people to stop being
themselves. I want to remember that
people can laugh, and crack jokes,
and be senseless and silly, sometimes,
like I like to be.
Well, to put it all that way I suppose
I just wanted him to be alive. I get
tired of thinking of people
as being dead, when they didn’t deserve
their fates and they deserved to
live on. I just get angry to think that people
who didn’t deserve this got this, and it was
awful luck, so to speak, and that they
needed more. Those are the times
when I try to make myself
remember what they liked and
how they lived. Well, that doesn’t
make me feel much better, but I
try to think of the good stuff anyway.
Sometimes I wonder about things
like that. Who is it harder on when
someone dies? Is it harder on the
ones who have to die? Or is it
harder on the survivors who have to live
with only a handful of memories?
When I almost died, I didn’t think about
death. I mean, I was unconscious,
I was in a coma. But when I felt like I
was starting to feel normal again,
well, all I could think about then was that
I had to get better. I had to teach myself
how to eat. And how to walk. And talk.
And I had to get out of that wheel-
chair that they wanted to keep me
seated in, even though I felt fine. When
people tried to make me different
from who I was, well, that’s when I
learned how to have my own set
of rules, and I also learned not to
tell anyone about my rules. No one
would want to hear my stupid little
rules, anyway. They’ll have to learn
about their own rules on their own time.
Death is a pretty scary subject. It
can cover a bunch of different
territories that the average person
isn’t ready for. Even when some of us
think we have it all together, well, that’s
when someone throws us the curve ball
of death to tell us that we might have
been wrong, that we might not have
been prepared for everything.
How do you prepare for something like
this, though? What do you do?
Copyright Janet Kuypers.
All rights reserved. No material
may be reprinted without express permission.
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