The one where we lose a friend

As weird as it seems, I always find it interesting how death tends to touch so many emotions and hearts, even when we’re not closely connected to the person. I’ve been an avid “Friends” fan for as long as I could remember and I don’t think it’s sunk in yet, that Matthew Perry has gone. I still watch the clips and laugh as though he’s somewhere in his own home, raking in the royalties. Perhaps it’s because it appears so removed from my reality; after all, he wasn’t someone close to me. Yet it feels as though he was, for all the years I’d enjoyed and quoted his witty remarks.

The Kubler-Ross model proposes that there are five stages of grief which occur: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I remember a time I’d juxtaposed this phenomenon with a breakup. After all, the relationship died. The love died. There was cause for grief, and the doctor in me took note of my symptoms as I passed through all five stages. If the two can truly be compared (however marginally), then it’s easier to understand how, even when I knew I was healing, random moments of pain still shocked me. It’s easier to accept the fact that subsequent breakups still occurred, still caused immense heartache but found me coping a bit better. It’s easier to acknowledge that it might not always be that way.

Today my aunt was laid to rest and I don’t know how I feel about that. I ended up not sending a tribute and honestly, there’s a part of me that still hasn’t accepted this finality – that she wouldn’t be at Chocolate house when next I go home for Christmas. Denial, right? Another part of me – the bigger one, perhaps – knows that upon all the deaths I’ve known of (and seen, given my line of work), I’m still unable to fully process the concept. What stage is that?

It’s weird that we know we’re not leaving this world alive yet are bewildered by the finality of death. Maybe it’s the sting of the shock, maybe it’s the irrevocability. Whichever way, there is no one way to grieve, and no time limit on the pain. A wise woman once said, “Time doesn’t heal the wounds, it just dulls it.” I guess that’s why months and years and even decades later, a seemingly simple thing can trigger a dam of memories. So does one ever truly “move on”?

As always, death has a way of sobering us all and reminding us how in the grand scheme of things, a lot of things are actually quite petty and trivial. The petty fights, the silent treatment, the ghosting, the malice we hold on to, the heavy hearts; are they worth it? Do we really have to wait until we’re out of time before we recognize the need to mend fences and heal? We really shouldn’t. Life would be much simpler if we didn’t.

Alas, sometimes, we do…