|
I have not done any postmortem detective work. When my dad died he had an active second family so it isn't like anything needed attending to by me. And I find that my theoretical relationship to death was pretty straight on.
I was sad for his suffering and for the grief of others. But I wasn't actually sad he was dead. He was alive, he's now dead. It happens to everybody. It's not joy but it doesn't bum me out either. And I find that, if anything, I have even less curiosity about his hidden (to me) life than when he was alive. The death of my great-grandmother in 1995 upset me greatly for a couple days but then it was over and I've never really looked back. I have what I had and that's enough for me. Reading a diary of her teen years wouldn't, I don't think, add anything.
I've longed joked that my life's goal is to leave no ripples. To live a life that I enjoy but that nobody else notices when it is over. To the extent my own death bothers me (and to date that isn't really much at all, though I'd prefer it be awhile) it is just again because of the extent to which it will upset other people. But the thought of passing through life, leaving no physical evidence and just memories in others seems fine to me.
I suspect that much of this is tied to being a child who could leave Christmas presents under a tree for weeks and never touch them and can now leave a fortune cookie in the restaurant unopened. Or not.
It's interesting to me in that I have what I suspect most people would consider a morbid acceptance of death but I tend to think that in so doing I've come out the other side of it without any morbidity at all. I've been lucky in that the amount of death I've experienced is relatively low, but I haven't yet, I don't think, experienced grief. At this point I suspect there's only one person who might trigger that, and both of us want to spare the other that.
Not sure what connection this has with the OP, it's just where the words took me after I started writing.
|