Loss -- Funny English

 

English is a funny language in the way we say things, especially about death.

In an Anne Tyler novel I'm reading, a character says she lost her mother. In the book she lost her three times, once to dementia, once when she went wandering in the neighborhood and once when she died.

Lost is often used to describe people who've died. Maybe if they are lost, it won't seem as permanent, they can be found again. In reality they can be found in memory, in photos, in old letters, but they won't be found in a hug or sharing a cup of tea across from us.

I've lost my grandparents, parents, my beloved stepmom, a friend of 50 years and another of 40 years. I didn't misplace them.   

The ashes of my friend of 40 years is in the cemetery to my village. Although I can't remember the exact cemetery locations in Malden, MA and Florida of my buried family members, I know if I go there I will be able to find their graves. 

I won't visit them because under current conditions, I do not want to enter the U.S. Visiting the final resting place of loved ones, was not something I did when I lived there. 

It was different with my grandmother, who made a several times a year ritual to visit the cemetery where her daughter, son and husband were buried. She loving planted flowers. She also visited the grave where her sister-in-law's family were buried nearby because her sister-in-law lived too far away in another state to do it. These visits are so different from those with the living with a cup of tea, a glass of wine and multi-person conversations that can be heard by everyone.

As a child we loved running around the cemetery while my grandmother planted the flowers, often chrysanthemums or pansies, without giving much thought to the people laid to rest under the grass where we played. 

Laid to rest is another of those phrases that doesn't say what is being said. Rest implies temporary and except for some religions, death is permanent. A bit closer to truth final resting place with the emphasis on final covers for both those who believe in life after death or not.

We also say things like, she passed. It seems like there was a deliberate movement. We pass cars, exams, property on to others, places, time and milestones in life like school graduations. Passing onto death has to be our biggest milestone worthy of a better word. 

There are ways people describe what the deceased is doing in death. "He's playing bridge with Aunt Evelyn, Uncle Butch and Auntie Bert" or "I hope he has lots of holes in one." We seldom mention, "I hope he doesn't run into X. Boy they hated each other." 

Even our pets have substitutions. We may lose a beloved pet, but more and more they cross the rainbow bridge a lovely image of them scampering across the bridge to a field with trees, flowers and four-footed friends on a sunny day.

Although I don't like to think of my own end, I do like the idea of me skipping across the bridge like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, to be greeted by Albert, Amadeus, Nikki, Mika, Clover, Toughie and all my lost pets and sitting down with long-gone family and friends.