I was talking recently to a friend whose family member has just died after a long illness. My friend was feeling unsettled and fed up with everyone, as one does. Her emotions weren’t what she expected.

“Well, even though you were prepared for death, you’re still grieving, and grief is weird. It’s not lying on your fainting couch dripping tears, it’s also utter fury,” I said.

She asked me to repeat that. I think she was writing it down. 

I told her about my family going off after the funeral to spread my mother’s ashes in the woods; I decided not to go with them, even though I had been the local daughter for ten years. It would have been very appropriate of me to go with them, but I wasn’t going to. I felt drained. Wrung dry. Fed up. Destroyed. Absolutely done. I felt as if I was the one who had died.

That disclosure also seemed to cheer my young friend up. 

I did not tell my friend about what I did after I deposited my husband in the hospice clinic so he could get intravenous morphine, after the pain pills stopped working at home. Once we got him settled, I came back to the house, and I began throwing all his clothes into trash bags, shouting, “How dare you! God damn you, Stephen! How dare you!” You see, he was leaving me. He wasn’t supposed to leave me. Son of a bitch. 

I didn’t tell my friend about that. 

I was mad at him for a year or so after he died, which doesn’t make sense, I know. Why should it make sense? Death isn’t appropriate. 

When my mother was dying, and later my husband, I sat there with them. They lay on their beds with their mouths open, breathing hard, and their eyes only half closed, and their faces in both cases bore an uncanny resemblance to turtles. It wasn’t peaceful or beautiful. It was fucking peculiar. 

My mother was an Episcopal priest, so she got to have a bishop to conduct her funeral. The happiest I was for a long time after she died was sitting with the tall, creaky bishop at my kitchen table, picking out hymns and deciding on which funeral service to use from the Book of Common Prayer, the two of us in cheerful agreement with one another.

For some reason, doing that made a lot more sense to me than spreading her ashes in the woods. There is a place for death in religion, after all; some would say it is the whole point of religion. Because death is the one thing we completely suck at accepting, even though it comes for us all. 

Well, it’s the one thing I suck at accepting, that’s for sure.