I decided to do my death graph myself - I made a comment on my wall about it.  It seems to me that for some reason we are conditioned to accept that death comes with ripe old age and that anything prior to that is somehow abhorrent, anathema.  Consequently we view it as negative and therefore questionable and something that we should seek to understand and demand an answer to.  That somehow the person who died and, we ourselves, have been cheated out of what is normal and usual.  In saying that, it does not mean that I believe violent premature death should not be viewed with the horror that it evokes but maybe, if we did see all death as part of life, rather than distinct from it, if it falls into a category outside of normal, we may not raise the question, ‘Why?’ Because in raising that question, we are challenging the person who is no longer there, in as much as we are challenging our preconceived, indoctrinated view of what normal is.  If this graph is anything to go by, then the norm is simply an illusion. 

Here is the small graph of the people who have died in my life.  I am now 44.  If the world is to be believed, the graph should be consistent, at the very least.  I am not quite sure how to interpret my results but the line which has no rhyme or reason echoes how I feel.  Death has not, in my experience, been the result of slow, lifelong expectation that eventually peters out when the body has decayed to the point that it can no longer sustain the person.  Instead it has been sudden, unexpected, haphazard, violent, surprising and has most certainly not been consistent with the demise of old, frail people.  Of those closest to me, only two of my grandparents made it to old age (although I accept that’s 50/50).  I didn’t even get to meet one of my grandmothers who died before I was born and my mother’s father died when I was about six.  I think he was two years into retirement. 

With thanks to Adrian

The graph here just goes up and down haphazardly.  I don’t see the slow, incremental, gentle line that I was expecting.  Of the people on this graph, four attempted suicide and three died directly through their attempts to end their own lives.  The fourth person’s failure to succeed in ending her misery merely extended it for a little longer.  It seems to me, something of an indictment on humanity at large, who persist in feeding us the illusion, as Heather so aptly put it, that temporary fragile things have a predictable and allocated time span.  The evidence in my life suggests that there is nothing predictable and in fact, that which I would have hoped would be (because it is what society reinforces) is more the exception than the rule. 

I wonder whether life would be easier if I simply accepted what is, rather than measuring what happens against an unrealistic yardstick, which leaves me feeling slighted.  On the subject of suicide too, I had something of a revelation in the days following my friend’s death.  As I have said in previous posts, I was not in a good place.  I stayed in bed for two days torturing myself with the futility of it all and my feelings of utter helplessness in the face of such random evil.  But on the second day, I found the courage to call my husband and to ask him to come home to support me.  That will be something of a first though a decade ago he made his way home, unbidden, to ensure my safety and the continuation of my fragile self.

He joined me in the bed with his laptop which is packed full of cinematographic diversion.  There is no discernment there and we had to sift through it with a fine tooth comb to ensure that nothing slipped under the radar to further undermine what was happening in my conscious and subconscious mind.  ‘The Secret Life of Bees,’ seemed to tick most of the boxes - lack of violence, bloodshed and it starred the ubiquitous Dakota Fanning so it passed muster, although I am not a fan.

Somehow, thankfully, it did make its way into my space.  It was not easy, delightful, happy Hollywood, in any way.  It touched on themes with which we are very familiar.  The theme of racism, which had raised its ugly head in our home, because of her death, and my husband’s deep sorrow that all that he did and the personal price and others paid, to help bring and end to apartheid, seems to have opened the floodgates to entitlement on a level hard to compute.  But somewhere within it, it also touched on mental ill health and in a way that I found comforting and reassuring, rather than frightening.  I think a lot of my response to my condition is in my fear of myself.  Fear that somehow, I am not normal.  Fear that the pain of my existence is such that from time to time, death beckons, mockingly because I fear it most.  Yet, here, in this distraction from our mourning, was a woman who decided that she had experienced enough and that she was going to determine when and how she would draw a line under her own suffering.

There was nothing frightening about it, nor shameful.  It was a decision that she made and much more than that, a decision that her siblings accepted without recrimination.  They did not seek to blame her, nor did they seek to blame themselves.  They treated her death as much a part of their lives as the joy of an impending marriage or news of an unfolding career. 

Something in those couple of hours set me free.  Set me free from the fear I have created in myself and it was liberating.  I tried, unsuccessfully, to raise the theme at the writing group I attend.  We were touching on the subject because of something someone else had read.  The lady next to me said, ‘What about those who are left behind?’  It was not simply a question, because it was loaded with tone!

It was the stock question.  The usual perspective and view that somehow, those that remain, should question and feel guilty, ashamed, angry, saddened, upset because they put themselves at the centre of the equation and judge death from there.  What if we did not put ourselves centre stage?  What if we were not conditioned to view death as so unnatural if it came prematurely?

These questions are not designed to somehow belittle premature death.  There is not a day that passes where I do not picture my friend and see the hole that she has left.  But I wonder whether we could all be a little more forgiving about the should haves, could haves, might haves that we seek answers to, even from her.  She did not, could not and has not behaved in such a way as to protect herself from what happened. 

Perhaps we should not even question, at all, and instead allow those questions to go unasked and unanswered.   There is no answer except that which is.