swollen eyes

Happy 1st Birthday, Peyton Avery Carron!!!

Oh, the brutzing! The brutzing! Over the course of this weekend, amidst my standard load of freelancing, I worked my way through the final episodes of Six Feet Under. I was fully prepared to bawl when Nate died and during the series finale; I was equipped with a massive wad of toilet paper tucked into the sofa the whole time (I’m running low on tissues!). Oh, god, did I cry when Nate died. And afterwards. But the dam really burst during the final episode, as Claire drove off into the sunset, and I saw all those snippets of the main characters’ futures, including their eventual deaths. It just tore out my fucking heart and I had the gasping sobs to prove it. (Although I didn’t cry until I vomited, like Missy did when she watched the episode.)

This was such a tremendously brilliant show—albeit teeth-gnashingly frustrating at times—and seeing it end was difficult. But that wasn’t the overwhelming reason for the tears. As is usually the case when I cry when watching a movie/TV show or reading a book, the luminously sad event unfurling onscreen (or on the page) acts as a catalyst, giving me the good, therapeutic cry I need but can’t initiate at will. It’s a catalyst that triggers all the pent-up gloom I have no reason to acknowledge on any given day: an amalgam of it’s so easy for things to go horrifically wrong and this could be the last day everything is okay and everyone I love is going to die. Maybe not for 80 years, but it will happen. As the tagline to Six Feet Under says: Everything, everyone, everywhere ends.

I’m not professing ignorance about this. I know death is the only thing on earth that is inevitable. But I try not to walk around each day thinking about it. I try not to think about the fact that any given day could be the future anniversary of my death or the future anniversary of a loved one’s death. I’m not denying death—I just don’t want it swim in it. I accept that death is natural and inevitable, and, to a certain extent, I’m not even afraid of it. But I am afraid of losing everyone I love over time, having them chipped away from me piecemeal. And really, at the end of the day, that is one of my most all-encompassing fears: I don’t want to outlive everyone I love.

I’m not eager to rush to the grave just yet—I’d like to live a satisfactorily long life, thank you very much—but I still want to die before my family and friends. I suppose that makes me selfish, but I don’t care. I flinch at the thought of going through the rigors of sorrow over and over. Finally coming to terms with one loss, only to be sideswiped by another. Watching the layers of my tribe peel away, one after another. That ongoing litany of grief every time I’m forced to let another person go.

I have the utmost admiration for people who end up in the position of outliving all the people they truly love, be it through the ordinary passage of time or through a cataclysmic event such as genocide, plague, famine, war. How do they do it? How do they keep going forward without ramming a white flag into the ground to announce their surrender?


song heard most recently before posting: Suite No. 6 in D Major, Courante—JS Bach