Thoughts After the Death of my Father
Richard Keshen
From Humanist in Canada, Summer 1989, Page 18
While someone one loves is dying, and in the intense period of grief after he has died, one can think of nothing else but that person. Something inside takes over, and gathers the mind into an intense point of concentration. When external things intrude, the mind returns to the person like a stretched elastic to its natural shape. One uses such expressions as “I can think of nothing else” and “The thought of him floods my mind”. The sense of utter compulsion — the single-minded concentration — constitutes a distinctive mental state.
After the initial period of grief the single-minded concentration wanes, and indeed, it gradually becomes difficult to focus fully, and for long, on the person who has died. The thoughts of his suffering, of never being able to see him again, and of death itself are too horrible. They are like bright, glaring lights averting one’s attention away. It is the self’s healing process beginning to assert itself and involves the re-establishing of the veil which obscures the horror of suffering and premature dying from one’s daily life.
It is like the feeling of walking through a forest at night: the vast impersonal forces, full of surprises and threatening violence — awesome. Then the day break, and the forest appears familiar, friendly, and beautiful. Trying to make the world as much as possible like the daytime forest, the nighttime forest is blocked from the mind, but is always there, waiting to reappear. Can one live only by blocking from our thoughts the future death of those we love and the intense suffering some people are undergoing every second of every day?
The world is good when one’s life is going well, but an awful place when suffering and death enter through those one loves. One could say: The overall attitude we take toward the world must be irrational, since it reflects the caprice of what is currently happening in one’s own life. But if the process of blocking is not wrong, and if at any rate it is inevitable, then these attitudes are best not thought of as irrational; nor are they rational.
Many people think if they can believe in God, then suffering and death have meaning and so life will be less horrible. My instincts lead me to the opposite conclusion. The true horror is that all this suffering and premature death is considered to be part of some great plan. The believer may say that if I could only envision the greater good more clearly, then I would not see how this greater good justifies the horrid things which happen. For me this line of thought is deeply repugnant and, at the deepest level, divides the nonbeliever from the believer.
A sense of meaninglessness may overcome us when we are confronted with the suffering and death either of those we love or of other innocent people who have so much to live for. There were, for example, the two young fathers who died, after terrible suffering, in my father’s ward. One man died because the retaining wall of a house he was building fell on him and broke his back, and the other because the aluminium ladder he was using to fix his roof touched an electric wire causing deep burns to his whole body.
Something so significant, something which moves us so much, should, one feels, have a meaning. Yet what can “meaning” signify in this context except point, purpose, or reason? But to talk of the point, purpose, or reason of deaths like these can only be to see them as the means to some greater end. If, however, one rejects this possibility, and moreover finds it repugnant, then this suffering and death must be without meaning. One must see these events, therefore, simply as the result of natural causes, as things which happen without point or purpose. Hence the sense of meaninglessness.
Meaninglessness can be partly overcome through the experience of solemnity. To experience a death as solemn is already to step back (at least a little) from the horribleness of death and, for the nonbeliever at least, to absorb the event into the more reflective attitude I call a sense of tragedy which embodies an affirmation of life. (Hence the experience of solemnity cannot occur during the initial intense period of grief, for the intensity precludes any reflective attitude.)
The dimension to life called the solemn includes such events as the ceremony of marriage, the birth of children, and the death of those we love. With the experience of solemnity, we feel ourselves in contact with what is deeper. We usually live as if life were a race in which we must achieve this or that before it is over. The experience of solemnity takes us for a moment out of the race. We step back, and the race for a brief time seems unimportant.
The experience of the solemn has traditionally been expressed through religious ritual. Some people argue that the solemn can be fully experienced through some kind of ritual. They point to the way that even nonbelievers find themselves turning back, usually in confusion and with embarrassment, to the religion of their childhood to mark their own marriages, the births of their children, or the deaths of those they love.
But solemnity can be experienced without ritual, and for some people ritual is actually a distraction. What ritual makes possible, however, is the collective expression of solemnity, and who could deny that this kind of sharing can add to the richness of our lives?
With or without ritual, there will be times when the pain of the world, at least for those of us who love, can be so heavy that nothing will help to transfigure the experience into solemnity. At times like these, the best for which we can hope is the silent warmth of a fellow human being with whom to share the night until the morning light hopefully dawns.