On Death

My grandfather died recently.  He was sick for a long time with multiple myeloma.  We had no kind of relationship, and I am no more grieved by his death than I would be by that of a rank stranger.  He was intelligent, stalwart, and aloof from me.  And he was proud of his life.

There was, of course, a funeral.  It was a military funeral because my grandfather was a veteran of the Korean War.  My wife and I attended.  Rituals are strange to me; I watched the death ceremony with some curiosity.  What did it mean to others?  How was the symbolism important?  Which emotional expressions were genuine and considered, and which were Pavlovian?  There were no answers in the proceedings.

I myself do not fear death.  I do fear pain and as an anxious person I am prone to dread, so I would prefer to die suddenly, having no idea what was happening.  But I have no dread of my own annihilation.  I am trying, through philosophy, to affect it now while I am alive.  I don't know what my grandfather felt.  Perhaps he was afraid.  But there is some evidence that he believed in something after death.  He may like many have dealt with death, however vainly, by rejecting it.  I wonder if my kin are as convinced as they seem to be that they shall see him again in another world.

My relationship with my grandfather ended long before his life did.  In fact it barely came into being at all.  I don't know why this is, but I know that I am neither easy to know nor particularly warm.  My grandfather was amiable and well liked, but he was critical of me.  As I grew, it became obvious that no connection was possible.  At the end we had added nothing to each other's lives.  I feel neither good nor bad about this.  What was is what was, and the past does not exist.

I think a lot of people are wrong about love.  They make relationships automatically, so when they try to explain how love happens they can't do it.  Describing their expectations for how others should have relationships, they get lost in imagery and make no sense.  Before he died, I visited my grandfather in the hospital and he told me that he loved me.  I don't know what it was about me that he could have loved, if anything; he didn't even really know me.  I have no idea what impression I made on him or how I managed to make it from outside his life.

Knowing me is a chore.  I have no respect for ritual and I intellectualize emotion.  I grieve only for what I have really lost, and I have doubts that loss is even worth considering in the course of a life that grows until it stops.  I don't fit and it's obvious.  But that's OK.  I don't blame anyone for feeling alienated from me.  My grandfather was 87 when he died.  Life is sometimes long, but even the longest life is in my opinion much too short to spend in fear of the inevitable or in torment of grief for things that will not be.