death

26 october

We have dear friends for dinner. As it happens with these two, the conversation comes and goes to pretty much every other theme. Now and then I get pissed off and cool down, as much as at some other moment any of them also get pissed by whatever stupidity I am saying at the moment, and then also cools down. I suppose that this is friendship in a nutshell, the space to give a break to the ones you love, knowing that they already did the same with you and they are still smiling, and, perhaps more important, still loving you. But not only that, not only that. There is also those moments in which we know that somehow we have, together, touched something that matters.

I can’t bear death, she said. I’m not ready, she said.

So we got to talk about it. These have been hard years, and hard months. The father of C. and my own father died few weeks appart, about a year and a half ago. In the past week the fathers of two very beloved friends died too. And Ilja, my dear Ilja, decided to let go, and is no more with us. You can say indeed that there haven’t been such cheerful times, the last times in my life.

And you will be right, and you also will be wrong.

Because some of these deaths, like the one of my father, left me angered. But others, like the one of Ilja, have left me sad, but also, in some weird way, happy. Ilja wanted to die as he did, and the last time we visited him, a day or two before the day he choosed to die, he was happier than what I had seen him in a long time. And in between these two extremes, whatever you want. There is an unthinkable diversity of ways in which I have reacted to death around me. I still remember, 32 years and 14 days later, the deep sense of loss, of being literally lost, when Virna Barrios died coming down of a mountain that we climbed together. Or the total sense of absurdity at the death of “the hippie” a young shaggy man that studied computation science with friends of me, and got caught in the violence of the Venezuelan police repressing a student demonstration.

But why would that be?

Consider that, as much as people dies in these days of pandemic, people is also born. So also some of my friends have got child recently, or about too. Now, facing a newborn, I can tell you that I have but one reaction, probably the same than yours. As the venezuelan line says “niño en cuna/que fortuna/que fortuna”, what a fortune indeed is, to have a baby in a cradle. The funny thing is that there is no certainty that people will have kids, but there is full certainty about people dying. So I could imagine that we are not prepared for newborns, and that there should be a whole panoplia of possible reactions, when we hear that somebody has born, or is pregnant. But no. It is always good news, and we are just happy. On the other side, we know that people will die. It almost never comes up as a surprise. So we should be prepared, and our reactions should be fairly standard. But they aren’t.   

Why is it that we are so unprepared to face loss?