Death, Loss, and Grieving

¶ … grandfather died I was only six years old. I didn't know my grandfather well; he lived far away from us, and I guess because of the costs of traveling, we did not get there as often as we would have liked, and my grandparents could not come here as often as they would have liked. As a six-year-old my feelings about death were simplistic. My guinea pig, named "Sunshine," had died the year before, and my mother helped me make a little burial box for him.

We used a hot glue gun to line a shoebox with fabric, and tenderly buried him in the back yard. I asked my mother if I would see Sunshine in heaven some day. She said that when we went to heaven our lives would be full of joy, and that if joy for me would be having Sunshine again, maybe that would be part of it, but that she didn't really know.

That surprised me, because my Sunday school teacher had made it sound as if adults knew all about what life after death is life. She had spoken with such certainty! If we were good, and did the best we could not to sin, and had the right religious beliefs, we would go to heaven. She made heaven sound wonderful, and I could not imagine heaven without Sunshine in it.

Then Granddad died, and I thought, "Maybe Sunshine will be there, but certainly Granddad will be!" I asked my mother and she said of course Granddad would be there, and one day in Heaven we would all be together again. But I remembered Granddad hiding Easter eggs, and I still cried. I said "But mommy that's so long from now." She said, yes, that was the greatest sadness, that it would be so long before we were all together again.

All this information was confirmed for me when I went to Grandddad's funeral. People like my dad and Granddad's best friend got up and told funny stories about him, one of which I still remember: one day my grandfather took my father on a roller coaster at a theme park. My father had bugged and bugged Granddad until he got a silly hat with mouse ears on it, and put it on.

Then dad got sick on the roller coaster, and Granddad had to use his hat as a receptacle when my dad got sick in the middle of the ride. According to my Dad, he never got on a roller coaster again, and Granddad never wore any kind of hat again. At six years old I didn't understand everything I needed to know about death.

It hurt to have Granddad gone, so I couldn't feel the love in my heart, and didn't realize that would stay along with the pain when I was six. They probably said that at the funeral, but I don't remember it. But I did connect his death with my early religious training. When I got older, I realized that for a person with religious beliefs, we get some control over death.

If we try to live a good life, we will have a better life after we die than we did before. Since I have grown older, I've seen other explanations of death. On Star Trek, the warrior Worf tells others that death is glorious if one dies in battle and shameful if they live out their lives as the prisoner of their enemies, and that suicide is the only choice if they are to have a noble afterlife.

According to one thing I read once, Eskimos were more pragmatic and would just set elderly people out to drift on an ice floe if they could no longer contribute to the support of the community. Maybe it's my beliefs coloring my thinking, but I don't believe they would have done that, since they believed that there was life in everything, including the rocks. It doesn't seem that they treated life casually if that was true.

While my family is religious, when we talk about Granddad, we don't talk about how he is in heaven and we'll see him again one day. We tell funny stories about him -- not only the rollercoaster story, which is legendary at this point, but the way he told the same jokes over and over -- and.