About the death of a loved one

As a child, I was confused and discouraged by the traditional phrase that ended the folk tales of happy love: “They lived happily ever after and died on the same day.” The mention of death immediately after a happy wedding was perceived as something inappropriate and frightening. It was also shocking that the death of both lovers came overnight. And only much later did I understand that this was the expression of a naive attempt by the collective consciousness to save the heroes from the inevitable suffering caused by the death of one of their lovers.

An outstanding psychologist and philosopher of the last century, Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camp, argued that a person is able to endure anything, provided that he endows what is happening and his own experiences with essential meaning. He once told a lecture that he was approached by his old friend, who shortly before that had lost his ardently beloved wife, with whom he had lived for many years. The friend’s condition was terrible, and he asked Frankl, apparently without any hope of any intelligible answer: “Tell me, from the position of your views, is there any meaning to my current suffering and what is it?”

Frankl asked him a counter-question: “What would happen if your wife outlived you?” “Oh,” the unfortunate widower answered, “it’s terrible to imagine how she would suffer now, God forbid.” “You see,” Frankl replied, “since death is inevitable and someone always dies earlier, your suffering makes sense that your wife didn’t have to experience it.”

Apparently, it is precisely so that none of the heroes of the tale of two lovers entering into a happy marriage will ever experience such grief as the death of their beloved, they will have to die at the same time, sometime in the distant future. But a fairy tale is a fairy tale because it can keep silent about what other people close to them experience with their simultaneous death …

The person does not leave without a trace. After his departure, the memory of him remains, and its manifestations are different. You can constantly lament over an irreparable loss and live in inescapable grief. But if relationships with loved ones gave a feeling of happiness, then constantly being in grief, driving yourself into it means betraying your past, melting everything experienced into longing and pain. Every memory of the past turns into not only regret that this joy cannot be returned, but also self-reproach – how can I now at least rejoice at something, even memories?

But here’s what I noticed: sometimes behind such inconsolability, not temporary (which is very natural), but permanent, for life, there is hidden the fact that the past was not really so cloudless and relations between people were complicated. Each of them was supported by the hope that things could still change for the better. The death of one of them not only deprives the other of such hope, but also leaves him in a void. In this case, the constant inescapable longing is not connected with memories of a happy and lost past, but with the fact that, in essence, nothing remained in the memory except an unfulfilled hope. And this heavy burden of the emptiness of the past crushes both faith in oneself and hope for happiness in the future. It remains only to suffer that everything ended before it really began. Is this suffering an unconscious attempt to mask the inferiority of past relationships?

If people had a feeling of genuine closeness, a merging of souls and bodies, then, of course, a severe initial shock from the loss and an acute attack of grief, an experience of the loss of meaning, are inevitable. But this state of grief does not stay forever, it goes away. Living memories of happiness and a sense of connection with the departed, a constant internal dialogue with him usually help to get out of it and return to life. The experience of a happy past can illuminate the future, help to believe in a new relationship without feeling betrayed. A loved one who left this world still remains with the one to whom he always wanted happiness, but just now he cannot give it himself. People who have experienced true intimacy turn to the happy periods of their past and draw strength from it for the present and future. And often they are not afraid to start building new relationships with those with whom the same relationship is possible. Re-experienced intimacy is illuminated by this past.

This is what those who loved us and departed to another world would wish for us, and they are worthy of such perpetuation – in our returned happiness.