The Year Everyone Died
In January, I got a call that my Nana had passed away. Just about 24 hours later, I got another call. My Papa was gone too. I was shocked. Not just because they died within a day of each other, but because they had been in my life for so long, part of me thought they always would be.
They were 98 and 99 years old.
My logical brain knew they couldn’t live forever but it was still hard to accept that from that day forward, I would have to refer to them in the past tense. That they wouldn’t be there for any of the important moments in my life to come. That I would never hear the words “I love you darling” or spend another Christmas at their home.
You can read more about my Nana and Papa here.
After their funeral, an old superstition resurfaced in my mind—that deaths come in threes. I started worrying about who would be next. I thought of the many people I know battling cancer. I thought of my parents and of Max. I thought of Honey, who went from being a little five pound cotton ball of a puppy to a ten year old dog, as if overnight. Or maybe, I thought, it would be me.
At the end of March, I got a call. My old boss, Josh, had passed away unexpectedly.
He was young, 25. I didn’t work for him for very long but he made a big impact on me, not just as a mentor or manager, but as a kind and wise soul. It seemed (seems) so unfair that he was taken so soon.
We always imagine that death will come when we’re old and gray, that our lives will have some sense of completion or closure, that life is like a play that will have a final act, a finale, a meaningful ending. But it turns out, death is much more random than that.
You can read more about Josh here.
A couple months later, in May, it became clear that at 60 years old, Max’s mom was losing her fight with cancer. Brigid had been sick since I met her a year and a half earlier, but you never would have guessed. She brought so much life into every room she entered with her warmth and laughter and sarcasm.
She seemed totally okay, until she wasn’t.
I guess there isn’t really a circumstance where death doesn’t come as a shock, no matter the age or the diagnosis, but again, I couldn’t believe what was happening.
I was working at her vintage store at the time, spending every day organizing and selling all these beautiful objects she had found at flea markets and estate sales, spending every night in the apartment she had designed for Max and I to live in. She was a big part of my life and I felt a responsibility to be present for my partner, who was losing his mom.
I can’t imagine anything more difficult than losing your mom.
I tried to be brave for him, but the truth is, I was terrified. Everywhere I went, it felt like the universe was dropping hints, the crow that started perching outside the store window, the orchid at the shop, whose flowers all fell off, the bee I found dead on the desk in our room.
Max was brave. He took it in stride, one day at a time. He said what he needed to say and found as much peace as I think anyone possibly could given the circumstances. He credited his capacity for grace in those painstaking days to the very woman he was grieving.
You can read more about Brigid here.
After that day, I searched for some kind of guidance or hope.
My family went to church when I was a kid, but Christianity never really resonated with me. It seemed unfair that God would base salvation off of the belief of his existence. It seemed narcissistic which I identified, even at a young age, as a uniquely human trait. I imagined all the kids in the world that just happened to be born into different belief systems. How would they be saved?
(I’m not an expert on Christianity and I’m sure there’s more to it than that but that was how I understood it as a child)
We stopped going to church by the time I was in middle school and by the time I was in high school, I identified as an atheist. I believed only in facts and science and all the knowledge in my rational brain pointed to death being final which triggered a deep sense of existential dread and anxiety that impacted the way I navigated the world (mostly in sheer terror).
In my twenties, I veered towards nihilism, drinking away my anxiety and trying to fill the void with external validation, which only made my panic attacks worse and my life decidedly harder.
There wasn’t one rock bottom moment, so much as there were many stones in the road that gave me no choice but to surrender to the will of the universe. My coping strategy was destroying my body and spiritually, I was in a black hole. It wasn’t until I surrendered to the wills of the world, that I felt any remote sense of even the possibility of peace.
After Brigid’s memorial service, I got a stack of books from the library. Books on death and consciousness that appealed to me because they didn’t identify with any particular religion but considered spirituality more broadly through an exploration of near death experiences and research on consciousness. Books that Brigid had read when she was sick. I know because every time I looked up one of the authors on social media, I saw that she had been following their work.
I learned how little we actually know about the brain, about how western ideals tend to inform our beliefs and even influence scientific research. I learned about the millions of accounts of NDE’s and alleged communications from “the other side”.
I wasn’t convinced by every claim but I was struck by one consistent theme. Even though perspectives varied from author to author, they were all rooted in the same core belief, that we are all inextricably united by a force that can only be described as love.
Love is, without a doubt, the basis of everything. Not some abstract, hard-to-fathom kind of love but the day-to-day kind that everyone knows-the kind of love we feel when we look at our spouse and our children, or even our animals. In its purest and most powerful form, this love is not jealous or selfish, but unconditional. This is the reality of realities, the incomprehensibly glorious truth of truths that lives and breathes at the core of everything that exists or will ever exist, and no remotely accurate understanding of who and what we are can be achieved by anyone who does not know it, and embody it in all of their actions.
- Eben Alexander
There is so much anger in the world right now and rightfully so. Anger is a natural symptom of grief. Everytime I open my phone, there are images of children, men and women, grandparents, mothers, mentors, musicians, poets and lovers who have all taken their final breaths. I wish I could hug their loved ones or give them a shoulder to cry on, like Max did for me when my grandparents died. I wish I could give them a safe place to rest or something warm to eat.
I don’t know what happens when we die, but I know that the love doesn’t disappear. That is now the axis of all of my beliefs. Our only option, if we want peace, is to act from a place of compassion, no matter how afraid we might be. If I’ve learned anything from all the deaths this year, it’s that love is much stronger than fear. If it wasn’t, I might have never survived 2023.
Thank you for reading Extra Honey. You can also find me on instagram.