Life, Loss, and Love

Reflections on human things

Dad wanted to be cremated. It took a few days to get his ashes, as all local crematories were booked up due to covid-related deaths. When it came to the burial, my sister clung to the urn so tightly they had to literally tear it away from her. I don’t know whether it’s mandatory here in Italy to bury the ashes, as opposed to keeping them in your living room or throwing them in the ocean or in the wind as I’ve seen done in the movies. Maybe you can take them home here too, but we wanted to put them in our family tomb, next to all our other deceased. And I don’t really like having an urn with ashes in plain sight. What do I say to those who ask what that is? That’s my dad? Creepy. Maybe even hilarious. It would certainly make me laugh. Plus, how can you possibly keep the ashes of a dead human in a place called living room? Sure, there’s the affection and the emotional stuff and this atavistic attachment to flesh and bones. But that’s just ashes, powdered remains of a human body. And chances are they’re largely casket material and clothes and what have you. 

So my sister wouldn’t let go of the urn. I found that understandable, as I guess we humans find it hard to de-materialize, think in abstract terms, transcend the physical. And those days were hard. Dad was fit for his eighty four years of age, and conducted a healthy life. Never smoked, didn’t drink, ate mostly fruits and vegetables. One morning, he suddenly (and inexplicably, based on his vitals) had a heart attack, was immediately operated on, and died from post-surgery complications. All in a matter of hours. As shocking as it was, I like to think of dad’s passing circumstances as something that I would sign up for without hesitation, when my turn comes: a healthy life up until the day I die, as late as possible, of some quick thing, with minimal or no suffering. If given the opportunity to choose, I’d pick that. Or dying in my sleep. 

But it was sudden. And if that’s good for the dying, it’s devastating for the living. When a loved one disappears like that, abruptly and unexpectedly, your life changes and you get sucked into this black magma where you feel trapped and nothing really matters and it may take a while to resurface, if at all. Death can hit you in destructive ways. Who loves the sun? Who cares that it makes plants grow? Who cares what it does, since you broke my heart?, says an old Velvet Underground song. Just replace “broke my heart” with “passed away”. So when my sister was holding on to the urn so tightly and aggressively and, in tears, didn’t want to part with what she viewed as the only remain of our dad, her last chance to be in physical contact with what once were his skin and hair and molecules, as much as I wasn’t thinking in those terms myself, right there and then I totally understood her. She was telling herself a story that gave her comfort, one where the remembrance of dad was confined to the content of that urn.

We need stories to survive, to overcome difficult moments. We need to craft and tell ourselves stories to depict a vision of the world that we can believe in, one that helps us give meaning to our actions. Our exclusive vision of the world. And this is a primary necessity for humans, like water and air. Without stories, our lives fade into insignificance, an undefinable and indescribable state where existence doesn’t matter. Religion and superstition and popular myths pre-package many stories for us, they are frameworks that make self-storytelling easier but also more standardized, that come to the rescue of the less creative and less reflective and less curious and maybe even the less courageous. Some have the freedom of thought to create their own stories, regardless of what’s written in the book of the overarching theory of life. Others resort to pre-created stories and make them theirs. And they’re equally content. 

We may be aware that our lives are made of stories, and acknowledge that being human means having mental constructs to believe in, models and theories that provide answers. And sort of play along as if we were a spectator of our own actions. Or we may go through our existence without acknowledging that and just taking some stories for granted, dogmatically believing that things are the way they are because they just are. 

If you’d asked me years ago what personal evolution is all about, I’d have told you that it’s about continuously learning, knowing more, acquiring the ability to discern and the experience to make more sensible decisions. In short, becoming more sure and confident about things. But, with time, I understood that personal evolution is about becoming less and less sure about things. It’s about abandoning dogma and having the courage to ask stupid questions and an infinite number of why’s and feeling lost in uncertainty and finally accepting all this as the normal state of living a human life. 

At thirty, I was so sure about how life had to be lived and how thoughts had to be thought and how ideas had to be developed and how people had to be dealt with. I was so sure of right and wrong and exactly where to draw the line. Now I can proudly and comfortably and freely say that I don’t know anything. That my views are as valuable as those of the person seated next to me on the subway, and that I’m wrong so many times and I can change ideas and opinions as much as I want and that’s okay. I think there’s beauty in realizing that this is something that happens naturally with time, and that maybe we have to go through certainty and dogma to be able to finally accept uncertainty and volatility. 

Most of the stories that stitched our lives together for centuries are easily debunkable devices aimed at making us feel good and secure. Or maybe not. Maybe believing that cemeteries are where the spirits of the dead actually linger on because they can’t really do without their body remains, and that at night they all come out and walk or fly around and see and talk to each other as if they were inhabitants of a little village and think about how to do something good for the living or how to simply spook them by putting some white bed sheets on, maybe believing all that is soothing and reassuring and helpful and I don’t know what else. Maybe realizing that everything ceases to exist once the body is gone and we all turn into worm food is not a good story, albeit plausible. Or maybe we need to acknowledge both ends of the spectrum and position ourselves somewhere in the middle, and pretend to believe some stories even knowing that they’re just made up. Like being both the spectators and the starring actors of our own lives, simultaneously. 

On this day, two years ago, at the height of covid, I was driving to my hometown after the sleepless night that followed dad’s passing. Lockdowns were in full force and the highway was deserted. The five hours that it would normally take me to get to my destination could have been cut in half, or at least shortened considerably, had I not deliberately slowed down to let thousands of memories flash before my eyes. Due to covid restrictions, there wouldn’t be any funeral and I didn’t even know whether they would allow me to see him for the last time at the morgue, before sealing the casket. And then I thought that maybe this no-funeral thing wasn’t really so bad. Dad certainly wouldn’t care. He didn’t care about things and possessions. He wasn’t attached to materialities and always lived his physical existence as the shell of something greater, something invisible and untouchable but totally present and perceivable and audible. He believed in the eternity of the spirit without being devout of anything. I don’t know about that myself. Sometimes I think there must be something to it, other times I think it’s a fairy tale. I’ve always oscillated between these two narratives. 

He was well the day before passing. We spoke on the phone and laughed at a little story of a guy he knew who spent his whole life amassing money and possessions, only to realize on his deathbed he couldn’t take anything with him. If you have more than you need, money should be used to do good, he said before hanging up. The last words I heard from him. 

I wonder whether love could be only based on immaterial things, or we really need a physical body for it to pour out. Or whether even only knowing that a physical body exists would be enough. If we could magically download a human’s immaterial features into an alexa-like machine, would we be able to love them the same without touching or seeing or smelling? Would it be easier to cope with their loss, when they eventually pass? Would there be cemeteries and caskets and urns? 

Maybe, instead of clinging to physical human remains we’d cling to something else, like an out-of-order alexa-like machine. But I guess our nature will always be to remain attached, somehow, to some material expression of those we loved.    

Who knows.

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