Let’s Talk About The Absurdity

Things can get a little weird in the liminality of loss

Loss can be absolutely absurd. People say and do things that they wouldn’t normally say and do. It’s like how the standard person cannot fully comprehend excessively large numbers. It creates a black hole of the mind. There is a clunky dance with logic when a person crosses the threshold into a place that is wild, unknown, vulnerable and raw.

We can watch movies and see how the actors do it when they receive grave news. We think we know the schema, that we will know how to react: cry out, drop to the ground, claim that it isn’t true, fight the inevitable, or grow numb and watch the world pass.

Then it actually happens, and it’s… something else.

We know this: there’s no prototype. There’s no telling exactly how it’s going to feel, how you’re going to respond, and how long it will hurt. There are more questions than answers. Meanwhile, the world turns, which, in itself, is absurd.

When we get difficult news, lose someone important, go through a huge shift, have our whole lives turned upside-down in various ways, we have a subjective experience that impacts our consciousness in way that makes it feel like life has started over again, which this is not reflected in the outer world. A person’s internal world is crumbling at the same time as, in their external world, their neighbor buys a new car, their sister is upset about their kid’s C+ in algebra, their best friend celebrates a promotion, and their boss takes photos of the wedge salad that they ordered to avoid carbs when what they really wanted was the pasta. And someday in the future, what you’ve been through may not be the #1 thing on your mind anymore, and you might be the person ordering the salad while, unbeknownst to you, someone else’s world is falling apart.

Then, there’s the business of everything that comes after, especially when we’re talking about death. Spending a day at the funeral home and walking out feeling hungry in a way that’s unfamiliar because it’s not hunger, it’s famine. In the book All My Puny Sorrows, the character representing the author, Miriam Toews, says after the death of her father, “He had seventy-seven dollars on him at the time and we used the money for Thai takeout because, as my friend Julie says about times like this: You still have to eat.”

All of the places the mind can imagine that a person has gone, that they’re just not around because not existing at all doesn’t make sense. Having that unexplainable feeling that your loved one is just angry and doesn’t want to talk to you, and you can’t text them and ask, “Did I do something wrong?” In A Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion shares that she was hesitant in moving or getting rid of her deceased husband’s shoes. Though she logically knew the fallacy in her line of thinking, there was still a part of her that believed her husband might need them.

Amid the absurdity of my own losses, I remember thinking that I did not learn about how to deal with death. I did not get a guidebook.

This very thought was a seed from which grew the drive for me to eventually do the work I am doing now, as some form of an answer to the questions: how do we learn how to deal with death, with loss? How do we know what do with it all? My Master’s degree didn’t prepare me for my losses, or for facing my own death. All that I know about grief I’ve learned from experiencing it. I stumbled my way through it, seeking out relevant books, expressing myself through art, and eventually making myself a student of death. I do not have all of the answers and I will always be a student. But I am building a community now, where I can join others in sharing our experiences and offering companionship.

I do believe it can make a difference knowing, from someone who has been there, that moments of absurdity are common. It can be meaningful to have someone remind you that you’re not losing your mind, that your mind is merely making sense of reality in whatever way that it can. That what you’re experiencing isn’t too heavy to share, that at least one person is not afraid to hear about what it’s been like for you. Someone who has traveled that liminal space before, who has done a similar clunky dance.