It’s been three weeks since my father died.
My mother died 20 years ago and though I still have bad days over losing her, two decades had dulled the pain enough that I forgot how sharp it feels in your gut, till I lost my father.
In a seemingly complete zig zag of emotion, which describes pretty much all my waking hours lately, I will say - we’ve been lucky. And by we, I mean all of us.
Nowadays, anyone born in the late 20th or 21st century in the Western world has been lucky when it comes to death. Death is a fact of life, but our experience with it has been minimized, compared to our ancestors, for whom death and loss were basically a way of life. I went 20 years without experiencing a traumatic loss. And it was another 20 years before I experienced that again. Some people go 50, 60 years without experiencing a close or devastating loss of a loved one.
Meanwhile, just a few generations past and for many generations before them, all there was was death and loss. There were some families who said good-bye to loved ones as they boarded ships to cross the unknown ocean to live in an unknown land, and they never saw each other again. Parents who never saw their children again or ever met their grandchildren. There were no phones calls to make. There were no photographs to share. It wasn’t death, but it was loss, and it happened all the time.
And then I think of people like my great-great grandmother, Mary Ellen Horgan Gorry, who was married to my great-great grandfather Jimmy Gorry in 1890 and had four children - Joseph Francis in 1891, twins Ellen and Mary in 1893, and my great grandfather Elmer Anthony in 1896. But Ellen and Mary died as infants in 1893, Jimmy died of tuberculosis after a 2 month illness in 1897, only 27 years old, and less than a year later, 7 year old Joseph died as well - Mary had loss three children and become a widow, all by the age of 25. Her story is not atypical. Death is a part of life, but it was more visible and pervasive back then. Mary herself went on to live to be 82, and she spent the last three years of her life sharing a home with her great-grandson, my dad, who called her More Grandma.
More Grandma with her grandsons Gerard, left, and Elmer, right. Circa 1939.
We have photographs and videos of our lost loved ones to help us remember them. We know how to write, and can write down our thoughts and memories for future generations. We have airplanes and cars that can transport us to be together in times of loss and grief - my brother in California was able to travel to New York to be with family the very same day my father died.
Yes, in a lot of ways we are lucky nowadays. But I wonder if past generations’ familiarity with death made it easier for our ancestors. If death is lurking around every corner and is expected and constant, do you feel the loss of loved ones as deep? If you don’t have photos to look at, then do you have anything to cry over every day? When infant mortality is so high, do you mourn the many you lose or do you celebrate the ones who lived? When disease is rampant, are you grateful your child was spared, even if your husband and parents were not? Does the constant realization of the fragility of life make you appreciate people more while they’re still in it?
Maybe it is past generations, and not us, who were actually the lucky ones…
I don’t know the point of this post. All I know is that the hole in my heart that has been there for 20 years is now twice as big.