The Unimaginable

We were walking in an old graveyard yesterday, and I saw two small graves side by side, siblings, a two year old who died April 26, 1736 and a one year old who died three days later. Maybe cholera, I thought. Smallpox, suggested S.

I can’t imagine parenting back then. Having all those babies, and then, too often, losing all those babies. We think perhaps they didn’t care as much. If you lose one baby after another before they can talk, you must get used to it. If you have eleven children, losing one can’t be that bad. But I’ve read lots of 18^th- and 19^th-century letters and diaries, and oh god it hurt them as much as it would hurt us. Read Darwin’s letters after the death of his nine-year-old daughter Annie to see pure devastation.

An old friend’s brother died last week. You might have seen it on the news. He was one of the three men killed when a woman trying to kill herself crashed into their stopped car at 70 miles per hour. She lived.

He was the youngest of four: the golden child, the light of everyone’s life. I haven’t seen his parents, but another friend said that a day after they heard the news they were still just sitting there, in shock, unable to speak.

There was a time in the middle of my 20s when I knew too many young men who died. One was shot while sneaking into Kurdish Iraq to take photographs during the first Gulf War; one died in a car accident in Zimbabwe; one was crushed in an avalanche out west while working on a search and rescue team; another fell off a mountain in Poland. There was an overdose in New York. There was AIDS in Vermont and California.

I only knew the parents of one of these men, and they are remarkable spiritual people who somehow managed to be at once destroyed and transcendent (if that makes no sense, I’m sorry, I can’t explain it, but that’s how they were). Honestly, though, I never thought about the parents of the others, about their grieving families. I thought about me and my friends and how young we were and how much life we were living and how wrong it was for them to die. But it comforted me, just a little, hardly, barely, but it did, that so many of them died doing what they wanted to do: hiking, war reporting, driving through the African bush.

I said to my friend that at least she had nothing to regret about her brother’s life, that he lived exactly as he wanted to live and had a great time doing it, and that’s not something you can say about just anyone. Still, it’s the smallest of small comfort.

I wish I could say that now I’m appreciating every inch of my children, of all my loved ones, that every moment I’m aware of how much I love them and how special they are and how much they mean to me. But I’m not. I nagged M to distraction last night about picking up her dirty clothes. All I wanted this afternoon was for E to stop whining about her computer game and leave me alone. I’m still here in ordinary life. I haven’t crossed over to the unimaginable realm of the bereft, and I pray that I never do.

But I feel so sick and so sad for all those who have.