It’s been a bad morning.
At some point last night I decided it would be an AWESOME idea to have a big, fat Screwdriver at 11:30. Sure, I’d started with some scotch at 6:30, then moved on to red wine, then on to a porter, then on to white wine, then back to red wine, then back to porter. It was at that point that I should have stopped, but my stupid drunk brain was like, “Dude. Dude. You know what would be awesome right now? A screwdriver! Yeah! Dude, it’s like, healthy ’cause it’s orange juice. Yeah, we should totally have one. Dude. Have I ever steered you wrong? Yeah. Awesome.”
And so there I was on the couch, screwdriver in one hand, remote in the other, barely able to focus on Ace of Cakes.
It should have come as no surprise to me that I had chest melting heartburn a few hours later, but upon waking I was like, “How on earth could THIS have happened?”
Nearly 8 hours later and the heartburn still isn’t completely gone, and I’ve got, as Angy Hangy put it so succinctly in a somewhat related email from last Friday, “liquid Drano” in my guts. I already dominated the bathroom in my house so thoroughly that when Sherlock poked his head through the door he immediately turned around and walked out. Before this morning I would have sworn that it was impossible for cats to gag.
Anyway, as I’m trying to pull my stupid, hungover ass together this morning, I got a call from my dad that my aunt had just died. She was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a few weeks ago, and the cancer was extremely aggressive, so it’s kind of good to know that she’s not in pain anymore.
I know I deal with death differently than other people, and my aunt is no exception. It’s hard to say right now if I feel sad. I feel bad for my dad, of course, as well as my other aunts and uncles, my cousins, and their kids. I know they’re really upset. And I feel bad for my Grandmother, because it’s got to be painful to lose a child. But I’m really hard pressed to describe my emotions as sad. I’m contemplative, somber, and pensive, and I sympathize with my relatives, but I’m not sad. And now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve ever been sad to hear about someone dying. I always express my condolences, because I know death can really tear other people apart inside, but sadness eludes me.
I’ve never had someone extremely close to me die, like my brothers, parents, or my wife. But even when I was a little kid and my grandfather died, I kind of just accepted it. And I think about people that have died, and I miss them, of course, but my mind never dwells on it. It’s kind of like, “Oh, I miss the way he used to joke about how we had three kinds of stuffing at Thanksgiving.” And then my thoughts move on.
I speculate that part of my lack of reaction is because I don’t believe in an afterlife. I’ve accepted death as an inevitability, so the deaths of others, or thinking about my own death, don’t cause me discomfort. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want my loved ones to die, but there’s nothing I can really do about it, so there’s no point in worrying over it.
I’m interested in having a frank discussion about death in the comments if anyone else is interested. How do you react to death or loss? Do you believe in the afterlife? If so or if not, does this comfort you? I hope it goes without saying that today most necrophilia jokes won’t be tolerated, but humor is always welcome.
