Hey gingerbop, my sincerest condolences, and yes, hugs to you and yours.
Death is certainly an occasion that can inspire confusion. Strong feelings of remorse, sadness, anger, guilt, and such can often be aroused by the occurrence of death. Now, I don’t mean the following in any sort of patronizing, cold, or harsh tone—only some thoughts on death in general and perhaps your situation in particular.
It seems to me that, while natural and often in tandem with death, thinking and feeling along the lines of “I was thinking about going to see him on friday. But i didnt. And i wish i had” is an intractable tar pit that will envelop a person ever deeper if such feelings and thoughts are dwelt and obsessed upon. I feel that “should” statements (“I should have seen him,” “I should have told her,” etc.) are too contingent and transitory to be appropriately applicable to something as terminal as death.
What I mean is some “should” statements have a place and function that is more or less reasonable and healthy—“I should have picked up some bananas while I was at the market,” for example, is a rather innocuous use of ‘should’. Other instances of “should” statements shade into being counter-productive and a waste of energy and feeling—“I should cut back on my consumption of X” (where X might be any of {caffeine, cigarettes, alcohol, sugar, plastic products, etc.}). Here ‘should’ appears to function more as a guilt inducing word which allows a person to carry on, in this example, consuming X while at the same time realizing that the consumption of X would be better put to a halt. I feel that the use of ‘should’ here is worthless: we are confronted with a choice and we either make the choice to stop consuming X or choose to keep on consuming X. Put differently, our use of ‘should’ in such cases in contingent on the possibility that we actually can do something different—there are possibilities available; thus, it seems better to not “should” ourselves in such situations, but rephrase our intent. With respect to the example, it is better to say, for further example, “I will stop consuming X because…” or say “While the consumption of X appears to be {harmful, unhealthy, unwise, etc.}, I am going to continue anyway.” Here we don’t allow ‘should’ to operate as a guilt inducing word that allows us to feel miserable about ourselves while continuing the particular action that is making us feel bad: we either stop or continue, but we remove guilt from the equation.
With respect to the death of a person it seems that we often want to “should” ourselves about this or that. However, clearly there is no reasonable way for that ‘should’ to operate at all: there is no longer the possibility of choice and there are no longer any options available. When a death occurs there is no going back nor is there any chance at resolution via interaction with the deceased. We are left alone to cope. So, what I am trying to say is that, while “shoulding” often occurs in tandem with a death, it doesn’t appear to accomplish anything other than to inspire even further grief via the implications of intractable guilt we impose on our self.
I sympathize dearly with the idea that “You don’t expect 18 year olds to die.” Too young, too many possibilities left unexplored—there’s really quite a loss when a person dies young. I imagine too that your peers are mostly around the same age, and it is thus even more difficult to understand and comprehend because the feelings of youthful vigour, zest, and “I’m going to live forever!” are such an integral aspect of your lives. I feel that this is likely why you might be feeling a heightened sense of “pointlessness”: in a flash so much potential has been removed from the world and yet the world keeps turning. It is very easy to feel the cold and lonely hand of nihilism that is the left hand of death. I feel that this is something that is natural to feel in proximity to death, especially given (what I am assuming is) your current mindscape, headspace, or etc.. All I can really offer you here, ginerbop, is that you still have your life and there are many other people with whom you share relations that also have theirs: there is still a huge (unthinkable!) amount of potential within all that; thus, there is still much meaning and value to your existence and those around you.
Again, love, hugs, and hope for you and yours brighter days ahead.
Z+ |
