Wounded people love the wrong way
Dying pets reveal whyBy James Giago Davies
nativesunnews.today Long years ago my Aunt Maggie died. That was my first funeral, and she was my favorite aunt, but I wasn’t especially sad. My mom cried, some people were grief stricken, it was a very solemn occasion, and I felt guilty I was not grieving. Death isn’t easy for genius philosophers to understand, and for a little kid, having not seen my Aunt Maggie actually die, somewhere in my still developing brain, the finality of it didn’t register. I had seen death. A kitten had clawed my sister Robin’s face, and my dad had grabbed it and tossed it against a wall, and it died seconds later, kicking, twitching. That I remember it, in such gruesome detail half a century later, suggests how horrifying and traumatic it was to watch. When my mom died, I was standing right next to her bed. One moment she was breathing, and the next, she wasn’t. Not sure how I would have processed that, if I would have cried, because my siblings took to fighting, the police got called, and I had to attend to that. Sometimes I think the way the living handle death is far worse than death itself. I lost my younger brother to a fishing accident forty years ago, and my older brother to suicide, just a few years back. One thing all of these deaths have in common, is people never come back. There is no chance the phone will ring or there will be a knock at the door, and it will be them. Regardless of how traumatic the reaction to death is, for me, far worse are the haunting memories. There are days when you can hear their voice, see their face with startling clarity, if only for a fleeting moment, and it is still enough to trigger fresh grieving. That is when you obsess over the instances where you mistreated them. I never hugged my little brother, never told him I loved him. I wish I could now, but our parents never taught us how to do that, because they never did it, because their parents never taught them. It takes a lifetime to undo such conditioning, and they all died leaving it undone.
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