How many goodbyes have you said that were decent enough to be considered “good” goodbye? Saying goodbyes is so difficult that perhaps saying goodbye is impossible.
There are times when goodbyes are unforeseen and catch you off guard. No one ever taught me how to process or respond to the loss. Having encountered several un-/expected goodbyes and seeing other close friends or relatives going through their loss, I realized that everyone copes with loss differently. So rules and know-how that are supposed to guide one through the chaos when goodbyes befall are not necessarily helpful.
Is Mourning Learnable?
The heatwave of 2018 put London on a steaming grill. Under the heat, people on the street looked confused and exhausted. Tourists seemed barely to notice the grande view of the city while they were cornered by burning sunlight. My sister and I, two tourists from an tropical island, also struggled with the uncanny heat while roaming in alleys and non-AC museums of this magnificent city. We were trapped by the overheated temperature of London as the Big Ben was trapped behind the scaffolding that year.
A text message popped up on my phone at 4 am. Before that, her sickness was never this close. In another overheated city on the other side of the world, our beloved feline family passed.
Nono was the youngest one in the family. She was always grumpy but was surrounded by so much love. Even though she was 19 years old when she passed, her senility did not make her death more acceptable.
As abstract as death is, yet it manifests as the emptiness of a room when the owner never returns.
I grew up in a culture where people avoid discussing death with their children. My family has lots of elephants in the room and death is some topic that rarely turns up in our dinner conversations. At my grandfather’s funeral, we, the grandchildren, were asked to perform several kinds of rituals, which, to me at that time, was funny and even embarrassing. The rituals seemed to transform grandpa into something that is permanently different from us. But no one really explained how these rituals manifest grandpa’s death or how these bizarre ceremonies can help us to process grandpa’s death.
The Goodbyes without Saying Goodbyes
In 2014 and 2020, my grandmothers passed away one after another. I did not have chances to say goodbyes. I did not fly back to attend the funerals, either. These goodbyes without saying goodbyes linger and overlap with other experiences of coping with losses in my life. The emptiness prolongs and eventually grows into a ruin. The landscape of the ruin is places that I am unable to revisit again. A part of me stays in grandma’s room in 2014 forever. I remember I told my grandma: “I’ll visit when I’m back from the US” when I sat next to her in her room. But she didn’t wait for me.
Mourning never repeats itself, neither does it disappear.
Until recently, I realized: the un-/processed losses significantly affects how I cope with breakup or close friends’ departure. The unsaid goodbyes evolve and come back at me with different kinds of emotions: sad, panic, and fear.
I have dreamt about my grandmothers many times after they passed. “They are worried about you. Living in a foreign country alone for so long…” My mom said. In my culture, dreaming about the deceased family member indicates that they have something to tell you or their spirit somehow could not leave yet. But is it the deceased that could not let go or it is us?
Grieving
To me, losing someone permanently, death of immediate family or close friends, is like a scar that grows in me. And, I relate this experience to some painful breakup. A major breakup can also leave people grieving for their loss. I panic whenever I think of someone that I probably will never meet again. People say: “get over and move on”. But, no one can tell me how to embrace the scar as a part of my broken self.
American Heart Association writer and editor, Michael Merschel, explains that grief is not like a condition, so you can expect to recover: “If the loss is permanent, then so is the grief, because we’re defining it as a response to loss”. From this, I think, probably, there is no set timeframe for grieving, since everyone deals with loss on their own timeline and capacity.
Grieving is a process of learning to cope with the loss and live with the pain. And it is okay to be sad even the sadness lasts longer than you expect.
