WHEN DEATH VISITS...

WHEN DEATH VISITS...

Death is a lonely visitor. After it visits your home, nothing is ever the same again. There is an empty place at the table; there is an absence in the house. When someone close to you dies, it is an incredibly strange and desolate experience. Something breaks within you then, which will never come together again. Gone is the person whom you loved, whose face and hands and body you knew so well. This body, for the first time, is completely empty. This is very frightening and strange. After the death many questions come into your mind concerning where the person has gone, what they see and feel now. The death of a loved one is bitterly lonely. When you really love someone, you would be willing to die in their place. Yet no-one can take another's place when that time comes. Each one of us has to go alone. It is so strange that when someone dies, they literally disappear.

Human experience includes all kinds of continuity and discontinuity, closeness and distance. In death, experience reaches the ultimate frontier. The deceased literally falls out of the visible world of form and presence. At birth you appear out of nowhere, at death you disappear to nowhere. If you have a row with someone you love and she goes away, if you desperately need to meet again, regardless of the distance, you can travel to where she is to find her. The terrible moment of loneliness in grief comes when you realize that you will never see the deceased again. The absence of their life, the absence of their voice, face and presence become something that, as Sylvia Plath says, begins to grow beside you like a tree.