Photo by Bruce Guthrie
A friend whose name you may know but who doesn't want it published wrote me a long message which I'm condensing down to this…
The sudden news that we'd lost Batton Lash hit me like a tsunami. I am somewhat amazed because while I certainly knew Batt, neither of us would describe the other as a close friend. We never ate together. We never vacationed together. I don't think I ever saw him outside a convention and all we did there was to chat and exchange compliments and pleasantries. Still, I find myself unable to think about anything else and to not be quite depressed at the news.
Your site has had some wonderful advice especially after Carolyn died about coping with grief and death. Do you have anything now which might make it easier to deal with this?
Well, it may help to acknowledge that one of the reasons a loss like that of Bat hits us hard is that he was roughly our age and we can't help thinking, "Gee, that could have been me!" As I've been mentioning here lately, one of the things that irks me about being 66 is that while I have a lot of friends who don't show or act their age, I have some who are determined to think older and to mention their depleted mortality in every third sentence.
I know a guy who's 72 and every time he sees that someone he knows of has died at the age of 75, he announces, "Guess I've only got three years left." Because we all know that people die at the exact same age, regardless of their physical conditions. (One time when he said it, I pointed out to him that the person had died in a traffic accident.)
Don't do that. Just don't. It's the worst kind of self-destructive negative thinking. As for being jolted by an unexpected death, remember the words of the recently-deceased author William Goldman. At the end of The Princess Bride, he wrote, "Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."
Yeah, it sucks that a great guy like Bat or [INSERT NAME HERE] is here one day, gone the next. So what are you going to do about it? You sure can't stop it.
So I'll tell you what you're going to do about it: You're going to learn to live with it. You're not going to like it but we live with lots of things we don't like and we find ways to cope with them and to minimize the harm they do to us.
When Carolyn was in what her doctors knew with rather uncanny precision would be her last year, I spent much time with Palliative Care (and later, Hospice) people. Palliative Care deals with "the quality of life" of a very sick person and even though I was not their patient and was covered by completely different healthcare, they spent a lot of time with me, making sure I'd hold up, get through it and retain whatever sanity and powers of judgement I had to apply. That was because the quality of Carolyn's remaining life had so much to do with me handling all the responsibilities and duties that fell on my rounded shoulders.
No one said this exactly to me but taking in all that they did say, I formulated the following view: The trick in coping with the death of someone you care about — whether that death has occurred or is just imminent — is to find the sweet spot between accepting that death and being paralyzed by it.
You don't want to be unaffected or unmoved by someone dying because, well, what kind of human being would you be if they told you someone you know just passed and you said, "Who gives a shit?" But too much grief is not good for your health. It's stupid to screw up your own life just because someone else lost theirs.
Celebrate the deceased. Remember them and if it's at all possible, try to keep alive something positive they brought to the world. But don't let the loss of them cause you to lose any part of yourself. If the departed was a good person, they wouldn't want that for you. And if he or she wasn't a good person…well, why are you overmourning them, for God's sake? You've got better things to do.