The Aftermath of Death: Navigating Through Your Grief
And the trauma of losing your loved one
It was the worst news you could ever receive.
“He’s dead.”
I was dumbfounded, in shock. I dropped my phone as if it had electrocuted me. The drive back to my house was silent.
I stood in the foyer of my house, my dead dad lying on a stretcher before me. The coroner asked if I would like a minute before they took away the body. His body.
With all the staring eyes at me, I felt on display. I couldn’t. I reached out to touch my dad, afraid that my touch might break him like glass.
I shuddered.
The aftermath is always what gets you.
The funeral
Funerals can be the worst. I got out on the lucky side. We didn’t have a funeral for my dad. My mom knew my sister and I would hide in the bathroom and it would be all but pointless.
Typically, when someone dies they have a funeral. It’s to honor the dead is what they say. It’s a celebration of their life.
The truth is the funeral is for the living. It’s not for the deceased. It’s so Uncle Jimmy and Aunt Karen can say goodbye. And their goodbyes are often dramatic and unnecessary.
You get all kinds of people coming out to give their condolences. People cry and tell stories about the person, acting as if they were best friends. In reality, they may have had a total of three conversations.
Funny how the living manage to make dying all about them.
The death goggles
If you’re lucky, you get the death goggles.
You know, the ones that you put on where you forget all the bad that ever happened. The person becomes a saint in your eyes.
This often happens with horrible people. They die and then people want to celebrate their life, forgetting how horrible a person they were. It seems rude and crass ‘because they’re dead,’ but that’s kind of the point.
People have this romantic image of death and how people die. You picture sitting around your loved one’s hospital bed. Telling your favorite stories and holding their hand. You laugh and smile while they slowly sleep into a quiet death.
This is way further from the truth than you can get.
Death is not pretty.
I had two relatives die within the span of six months — my aunt and my dad.
I wasn’t with my aunt, but my mom tells me it was awful. How she had seizures and flailed on the bed. How they tried to give her medication but she wouldn’t take it. It was a rough death.
My dad, on the other hand, had a quieter death. He deteriorated quickly and by the day he died, he was bedbound and couldn’t speak. He chose to die when everyone was out of the house, all by himself.
We didn’t get to say goodbye. It just happened for us.
The grief
It doesn’t hit you at first. At first, it doesn’t seem real. You’re numb and going through the motions. After they die, you have to make all sorts of arrangements.
Did they want to be buried or cremated? Do you have a ceremony or not?
These decisions have to be made swiftly, with little time for thought or consideration.
The grief isn’t there yet. Just a numbness. You do what needs to be done. You make the decisions. You write the obituary. You have a service. Like clockwork, these decisions are made, leaving you little time to grieve.
The grief doesn’t hit you until it’s finally over. Once all the presents stop and you’re alone in your house, then it comes for you. It hits you full force and you don’t know how to handle it.
Here’s a tip: grief is different for everyone. You will grieve however you need to and nobody can judge you for that.
People will judge you for being sad, for not being sad enough. For moving on, but not fast enough. And none of it even matters to you. You feel so dead inside anyway. Who cares what they think?
Ghosts of the past
One of the hardest parts of letting go is letting go of the person you thought you knew. Because chances are, you go through their things and learn things you didn’t know.
You have to go through their belongings and make tough decisions. You have to choose whether or not to throw things away. It feels like you’re throwing away their legacy, but there is no other choice.
People have a way of hiding all their worst qualities and habits.
It’s common for widows to find out their spouses had affairs or have second families. You have to go through your loved one’s possessions and you find out all the things they kept from you.
Sometimes it’s second families, sometimes it’s alcoholism. You never really notice how bad something is until you see the evidence up close and personal.
My dad was clever at hiding. We never knew how deep his alcoholism ran until he died. Then we found the receipts. And the bottles. It changes how you see a person. It shouldn’t but it colors the person you thought you knew.
Social pity
For the first few weeks, after they die, people send gifts in spades. You drown in the cards. Your home is overpowered by flowers. And your fridge is full of food you won’t eat.
People send all this food, expecting that you need it, and you do. But you don’t have the heart to tell them that you’re not hungry. You end up throwing most of it out. Your counters are filled with cookies, pasta, and roasts, but you’re too sick to eat any of it.
True colors
If there’s anything that happens after someone dies you find out people’s true colors.
The social pity hangs over your head. People talk about you behind your back. And worse, they stop talking to the front.
When someone dies, nobody knows how to handle it. You’ll go out with your friends and they won’t know what to say to you. They’re too afraid to bring it up, thinking you’re so fragile you’ll break if they do.
Not like you forgot. You’ll never forget that it happened, but they will. Your life has been turned upside down, a total 180 degrees and to your peers, it’s like it didn’t happen.
Here you are with your entire world changed. It’s never going to be the same. But you’ll watch as people go around you day by day, their world staying the same. It kills you.
Eventually, your friends give up on you. They think you’re too sad and can’t handle it. It’s like you’re a broken toy that they can’t fix. You become a social pariah. People act as if you’re contagious. Like if they talk to you, part of them will die too. Or it will infect their life next.
You find out who your true friends are.
Adversity does not build character, it reveals it. — James Lane Allen
Then you have the family and psychos that comes out of the woodwork to take advantage of the situation. They try to steal and pilfer every last bit they can.
Family you’ve never seen before comes knocking on your door looking for a cash handout.
You’ll see how people really behave when the chips are down. You’ll find out what they truly value.
Final thoughts
Losing someone you love is one of the hardest things you ever have to go through in life. The sheer pain of losing someone is enough to undo you.
And grief is funny. It comes and goes in waves. One day, you’ll be out with friends and feel fine. The next day you’ll be at home cooking and suddenly turn into a puddle of tears.
The pain never goes away, but it hurts less over time.
The person you loved may be gone, but you will never forget them.
