Inevitable Losses

I confess I think about the elephant in the room more often than I used to. I know he's watching me. Waiting. Maybe even taking notes. There are times I imagine I can hear him breathing or swishing his ears to chase away flies.

“If we could harness denial for good,” I sometimes remark to him, “We could remake the world.”

He doesn't answer. He is a patient elephant who knows his power and has no need to prove it. Not yet.

It's comforting to romanticize death and give it a Hollywood touch. I have my favorites, of course. Patrick Swayze climbing a shining, golden stairway to heaven in Ghost. A young girl who falls in love with Monte Markam as death in Death Takes a Holiday. Will Smith summoning Jack Lemmon in The Legend of Bagger Vance. After all, if death looked like Brad Pitt in Meet Joe Black, who wouldn't be ready to go? The idea of an other side, one with peace and justice and all the animals I have loved so dearly, beckons charmingly when it's not an elephant.

These are the times, as a dear friend so elegantly put it, of inevitable losses. Not even denial will protect us. We start dying the very second we're born but somehow for the majority of our lives, we detour around the idea. The innocence of childhood grows into the invulnerability of youth and then into the distraction of adulthood. We build our lives, rebuild them when needed, and haven't a free second to contemplate how fragile and foolish it all is, until the people we have grown up with or loved or counted upon or wished away are gone. And when the day finally comes that a small voice whispers about mortality and another smaller voice whispers back, “You're going to die too” and you realize it's true.....well, there's that elephant again. Once you've seen him, you can't un-see him.

How did I not notice, you ask yourself.

Am I prepared, you think.

Where did it all go, you wonder.

Oh my God, this can't be happening, you protest, I'm nowhere near done!

Your thoughts turn to dying in your sleep. To cardiac arrest and strokes and unexpected falls.

To making a will and upgrading your life insurance if you have any. To catastrophic illnesses and dementia and memorial services. To assisted living centers or worse, nursing homes. Not all the time, of course - a person would go mad with worry and the elephant would win prematurely - but often enough to make you pay attention and feel just a little sick at the sheer hopelessness of it. Dark thoughts, depressing thoughts, reality thoughts. Thoughts about empty rooms and nothingness. Small wonder you reach for the blanket of denial and burrow beneath it.

What to do about the death thing, my oldest friend writes.

What indeed.  The next time I look up, the elephant has moved a little closer.  He makes eye contact and gives me a salacious wink.  I think I can hear him humming a toneless little tune.

"You underestimate the indomitable human spirit," I tell him under my breath and he smiles gently.

"I think not," he whispers back, "I feed on it."

"We will kick and scream and fight," I warn him.

"Some will," he concedes, "but once their work is done, some will come willingly.  And in the end, all will come, ready or not.  Writing about it or trying to understand will change nothing."

And that is what we do about the death thing.  We live, we endure, we wait.  Some of us hope that what we were taught as children is true.  Some expect to go into the darkness and wink out like a bad bulb while others plan on coming back as something else.  

We can't know the elephant, can't dismantle him or pretend he isn't here.  He won't be distracted by faith or denial or fairness or fear of the unknown.  We can't starve him out, can't bargain with him and can't hide from him.   

The elephant just is.  The best we can do is work around him and not let him blot out the light.