The immeasurable depths of grief

EVEN though there is nothing more certain in life than death, when someone dies unexpectedly our natural instinct is to ask why. We are especially keen to ascertain the cause when the death is of someone who is a contemporary or younger. But as someone pointed out recently, what does it matter? Dead is dead.

It took me a long time to work it out but approximately 90 per cent of what anyone says to you is really about them. If they’re telling you how nice you are it’s because you make them feel good. If they’re saying you’re a wagon, it’s because you make them feel bad. The same therefore applies to death. Wanting to know how or why someone has died is more about us than about them. Of course, there is curiosity but at the heart of it we want to know, especially when the cause is not old age, could their early death happen to us?

There is nothing particularly strange in that. Death is in many ways the greatest mystery of life. But what is strange perhaps is that we somehow grade death. Maybe even without ever voicing it, or thinking it through logically, we consider some deaths sadder than others. We certainly try to minimise death for the bereaved with all that “good innings”, “blessed release” malarkey. Where phrases like that apply it suggests that this loss is not too high on the tragedy scale. It also somehow relieves us of the burden of other people’s pain.

But what that someone was saying recently was that there is no grade of death. No lesser loss. It doesn’t matter how or why someone died, or when. Sometimes you wouldn’t know it to hear people talk but suffering is not a competition. Every death is awful in its own way and utterly devastating to those left in mourning.