Does Love Die?

I rarely say positive things about the 2.5 years I attended college before dropping out to immigrate to Israel and join the Israeli Defense Forces. I truly hated it and felt that I had not learned much in my small, all women, liberal arts college, but that is not true. I learnt so much in my studies of psychology and data science that amounted into two different things: a research paper about how experiencing grief in pre-adolescence motivates college students with some beautiful graphs made by yours truly and a speech required for the honors program about a very similar topic. The latter is easier to absorb, so I will share it here with all of you, about how grief has shaped me and my views on death. 

I remember the relief I felt writing this, staying up till 2 am every day, slurping kosher ramen hunched over my macbook in my rock solid dorm bed. And the nerves reading it out loud for practice to all of my friends and finally during finals week. Well, during finals week I showed up an hour late in my pajamas with a hood covering my bed head, read my speech as soon as possible and walked out of the room immediately after, never to ever return to that program. Again, I feel relieved and excited to share my favorite lesson and creation from my college career with all of you, especially today. I hope that you all understand a little more how my mind works and the way that I idealistically see this painfully beautiful world. More importantly, I hope that your world looks a little different, and a little more like mine. 

***** 

Hi! My name is Luci, and my mom is dead.

In case you need proof. I tragically had 9 grandparents die over the course of the semester, so I did need proof lol

This is a typical greeting at a grief support group. What is your first impression about this identity, this “alter ego” I have presumed? Judging by the looks in the room, now I’m no double “O” seven, but I can tell that your thoughts of me have drastically changed in the past minute. Although this is not my favorite identity, I do love my Red Forman inspired nickname “dumbass,” this one is definitely up there. My mother dying changed my life, not for better or worse but definitely in an unfathomable way. This is a hot take, but I think that this is truly a good thing. How on earth could I possibly say that my mom dying is a good thing? My mother is the only person I have ever truly loved, and I’d give the entire world to get her back, but I can’t. So what has made my mother’s death such a good thing…missing her. Without her here, I am forced to see the world through a whole new lens. 

So what are these Ray-Ban’s and where can I buy them? After this speech for $9.99 plus shipping and handling.

Said glasses, and as you can tell, I needed them

I wish, but now I have a new perspective of appreciation for the world around me- happiness for the good moments in life and then when the storm rolls in, gratitude for being able to dance in the rain. I guess it is more like lasek, because once you lose somebody there is no going back to the blurry life you lived before.

As much as I want to say that my Judaism, or my plethora of therapists helped me to reach this point, they didn’t. What has been so magical about coming to terms to a world without my mom in it is that every little epiphany has randomly occurred from a seemingly ordinary moment. There is something to say about the extraordinary nature of the ordinary. And grief is an extraordinarily ordinary natural part of life. 

Death is not a topic we normally talk about on a first date. For this speech, I did in fact do this, multiple times, and let's just say I’m not going anywhere. Death is not the only reason I am single, but it is a red flag. There are so many taboo topics that we don’t bring up on first dates but can normally talk about with our friends. Some examples are sex, politics, or finances. I shouldn’t talk about these topics with my dates, yet they regularly come up in conversation with my friends, professors, and uber drivers. But death, it just keeps getting ignored, it is given politically correct aliases and euphemisms to forget and ignore that it actually exists. And then when we are reminded of death, what was once an foreign idea that affects our teachers, neighbors, friends, but never us; when it actually touches us, it destroys us.

My mother’s death destroyed me. I lost the only connection to my family, my community, my religion, and my soul. “George Stephanopolous’s baby” (a ‘beloved’ nickname she bestowed upon me) died the second I felt her pulse pause, never to resume. The little girl who dedicated all of her artwork, prayers, meets and burnt batches of challah to ema shela, her mother, was gone.

I still miss her, maybe not her hair

I was left a body on a blue planet that turned black, lost, thrown onto an unfamiliar path searching for my humanity. I was angry that G-d killed the parent who loved me and let the parent who hated me live. I was confused, what was death? WHAT IS DEATH?!

When she died, people from all backgrounds and walks of life spoke pseudo-soothing words about my brave mother who they wish they spent more time with during her seven year battle with cancer. “I am so sorry for your loss” or “It was so hard to hear about the passing of your mom,” These and many more are the euphemisms we say to those grieving. The verbage “your loss” or “passing”, is used regularly when talking about characters in the storybooks and in our lives. But what do they really mean? My “loss.” Was the game tied or in double overtime, is she hiding under the couch? Her “passing.” Did she speed past me on Storrow Drive, was she thrown thirty yards into the endzone? These words do not mean death. They do not make sense being applied to death and then when we face death, IT does not make any sense. Why are we avoiding these words: Death, dead, died. Do they not earn enough scrabble points for our liking? 

Death itself or being dead is not a scary concept. We can watch Grey’s Anatomy and see hundreds of patients die without a thought in our minds. The animals we eat, for the most part, are dead. Their blood is not circulating. Death is defined as the termination of biological processes in a living organism. Now that doesn’t sound scary, it sounds like a concept I was forced to study for the SAT. What is actually the scary, confusing, paralyzing thing about death? It is the mystifying “loss” or “passing.”

The words loss and passing really don’t make sense to me, but don’t take my word for it. You can take actor and producer Greg Wise’s. Along with Sense and Sensibility, he is famous for losing his sister Clare to terminal cancer. Greg spent three long month’s with his sister in hospice and I, three short ones with my mom. When talking to journalist Natasha Lunn in Conversations on Love, he starts the discussion by stating “unless we use the appropriate words, we can’t honestly explore this topic.” And because of this, we truly have never honestly explored death. Until now. 

Think about the first time you heard the word death, or had a discussion about death? Was the word death even used? Did you fully understand it? Probably not. Death and loss are two different words. My mother is dead, she is not lost. Her body is buried at Lincoln State Park Jewish Cemetery in Warwick, Rhode Island.

I hope there will always be a rock on her grave...ifkyk

Her body is still here, and so is her legacy: the children she raised are in college, the countless lives she saved are still being lived,  and she is the topic of this speech. Her memory will live on through those rambunctious rascals of hers, the grateful people she advocated for, and all of you who are imagining the heroine that raised me. For she will never get to meet my future boyfriend, the families she created or you, but you all will know her and be able to find her. Just open your eyes, ears and hearts. Not only is she still here, but she will come back to me when I am older. In Buddhist culture, death does not mean that someone is gone, but that they are reborn. My mother’s neshama, or atman in buddhism, will be passed to my children and that is a beautiful thing. That I get to not only have her spirit resurrect, but get to experience her greatest experience in life with her-motherhood. 

I hope that you aren’t scared right now, because one day your mom will be like mine, dead. It will happen one day, it has to. Nobody has probably said this to you before, but this is a fact that you need to accept. Death is a natural part of life. This brutally honest paragraph, and presentation sounds like “it is a foreign language, but it's an essential one.” Death’s legitimacy does not take away any of the painful emotions we experience surrounding it. The pain I felt losing my mom, Greg Wise felt losing his sister, that you have felt before or watched a loved one feel before, sucks. There are no feelings that come close to all of those surrounding death, but pain is not the right word. Some of the right words are isolation, confusion, anger, denial, terror, and most importantly LOVE.  Of all the emotions that I have felt during this “tough time,” love is the most prominent. I love my mom so much it hurts. It hurts me that I cannot hug her, call her, or be with her because I love her so much. 

We feel the isolation, confusion, anger, denial and terror, because we love someone so much that when they leave, we cannot imagine life without them. But we are still here and have to live. They want us to live for them and we owe it to them to keep living. So this grief that I used to battle with but now live with, is unexpressed love that fuels me to keep living with love. When I cry on her birthday, it is not simply because she is dead, but because I cannot wish for her to have more years with me. When I scream in anger at the doctor’s office filling out family medical history, it is not because my mom is dead, but because I can never ask her about all of the IBS in our family. She will never hear me say “I love you” again and that makes me sad because I wish she knew how much I did, I do. All of those bad feelings, the pain that very much does exist, stems from the love we have for the dead who were once with us.

I've always struggled with this picture, but it captures the duality I am trying to convey

That love has nowhere to go and comes out of us in different ways. When writing, I was in tears at this part, the love that I have for her, that I am feeling while typing on this macbook or reading this paper aloud is coming out through the salty snotty tears, shaky voice, trembling hands, tightening chest and genuineness in my soul. I cannot tell my mom that I love her, but she can watch this physical expression and see just how much I do. Today and every day for the rest of my life. And that is beautiful. 

I will never “get over it,” “be fixed,” or healed,” but I don’t want to be. If there ever is a day where I do not feel this much love for her, then I hope that it will be my last one. I love that I get to keep loving her, even in this not ideal way, because to fully love with a broken heart is to live. And I hope you all get to live one day. 

I hope you have wrinkles when it's your time to walk in my shoes

Grief is not a problem, illness, or avoidable. It is a new aspect of life that everyone will experience. You will not get lucky and never experience it. In my culture, the word for truth (אמת) literally means I will die. Because death is a true fact of life that we all live with and will face one day. When looking deeper at the etymology of the word אמת, it means the beginning of death, or that death is the beginning.

Because it is not the end, but a new beginning. 

And we can choose to ignore it, labeling it as an incurable pain, which would be a real loss or choose to embrace it, with our minds and hearts finally at rest. Every day, we have to choose to put on those Ray-Ban’s so that one day as we, yes us we, sit on our own death bed, we will have lasik and be ready to embrace that love. Hearing this will not make death any easier to experience because it is an ugly part of life, but the hidden love is the collateral beauty of death.

*****

I get chills and feel an immense amount of pride in myself. Despite the sadness in this topic, it is one that I deeply enjoy talking about. I truly think that this idea about love, this different perspective about death can truly change the world. Now death is very painful and I do not want to delegitimize it or anyone’s feelings, but if we change how we talk about it, especially for children, we can save them from the pain of learning this lesson after their loved one dies. I am very passionate about this topic and in my career, I want to work with children supporting them through the death of their loved ones. Not from the perspective of a savior, someone trying to overcompensate for living a life of privilege, but I want to be what I never had. I wish someone talked to me about death in this way, I wish someone truly understood my pain. I wish that people understand the pain I live with every day, because these nuances around death make it something so hard to talk about even with my close friends and family. 

I hope that by writing this and sharing it, more people can even start the conversations that we want to avoid and finally recognize the unavoidable feelings that live inside all of us. The more we understand each other, the more compassion and love we can give to each other. The more we love each other, the more love we have for our lives and inevitable deaths. 

The start of my career volunteering with grieving children and adults with special needs. I hope to touch many more lives