When I posted my thoughts about grief (see previous entry) on Facebook, I little imagined how deeply and movingly people would respond. It had me thinking that we often fail to give social media its due. It is not always about immediacy, about surface… So I had to write more:
In response to my post about grief yesterday, a couple of good people suggested that grief was “a waste of time”. I disagree. I think I see what they mean, though. Grief is a healthy and necessary process, as I see it, a natural response to one—or many!—of the blows with which life constantly bombards us. The point I wanted to make is that, as with any other emotion, it's important to avoid clinging to grief, as though it were the only reality. We live in a condition of impermanence, and need to understand that even a powerful, often overwhelming emotion like grief is no less subject to impermanence than fear, or anger—even joy. Which doesn't mean that we should brush it off. It's important, as I see to, to experience it, and experience it in full consciousness. If we don't, that's when it sticks.
There were also responses to some thoughts I expressed about death and dying:
Another thing I wanted to clarify: the fear of dying. (Oh, this is getting serious...)
I'm told that the dread of incontinence, incapacity, dependence is "fear of dying lite." Okay. But I do think thee's a difference between the fear of dying and the fear of death. Someone else refined my perhaps overly casual remark with the thought that what is to be feared is a dying process that is painful and interminably prolonged. I agree.
If given a choice--I won't be!--I would like to die like that monk I once read about: sitting quietly, without resistance but also without urgency, in full consciousness of the process, able to watch it every step of the way. And, if there is a "passage" to some further state of existence (I remain skeptical) I’d very much like to be aware of where it is I'm going! That would be the first step in what my sister, before her own too-early death, insisted cheerfully was "the next great adventure." I'd like to think, seven years later now, that she is still embarked on that adventure!
And lastly…
In all this about grief, and death and dying, I completely forgot to mark D-Day, the beginning of the end of at least one manifestation of fascism in Europe. We Europeans (I still count myself one, at heart) need to remember our debt of gratitude to our primary allies in this endeavor: Americans. The thousands of young men at the start of their adult life, whose lives were snatched from them in the brutal ugliness of war. If not for them, their incredible courage and their sacrifice, the history of Europe would look very different today. I can't claim to know how, but different, for sure.
This day should bring our attention to the resurgence of fascism, in our own country as well as in Europe, and the urgent need to repel it. Too, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is a stark and unmistakable echo of the facts and the consequences Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939. Will Putin content himself with one little bite of the European apple? Not if history tells us anything about men of his kind.
The least we can do in America today, to honor those thousands of brave souls who died on those beaches, and thousands more who were wounded, is to commit ourselves to the continuing struggle against men such as Hitler, Stalin and Putin, and the totalitarianism for which they stand.
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