It's (Only/Already) Been 4 Days

Soon it will be 100 hours.

I can’t stop looking at the time, counting the hours, watching them tick away, watching the distance increase. He’s been dead for 4 days. He was with me a bit longer than 42.5 years. One of those numbers will continue increasing – forever. The other is fixed, frozen in the past, cast in amber, fading from view, until, at the last, it will be gone even from living memory. The moment we die, we begin to disappear. Only a few of us have names that ring down through time. Entire branches of our ancestral tree are known to us only by a single skull, or some finger bones and a few teeth.

And the wind shall say: ‘Here were decent Godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.
—T S Eliot

A single sentence will suffice for modern man. He fornicated and read the papers.
—Albert Camus

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley

One of my father’s favorite quotes (which he credited to Asimov, but I’ve never confirmed this) was something like: “Enough time will pass that even the Earth will be regarded as myth.” This has long struck me as one of the biggest tragedies of life: not that we die, but that we disappear. Once we’re gone, we exist soley within memories, and those are always changing, always fading, and in time the others will also die. It’s true of all of us: sic semper tyrannis, so too for me, and for you, and, saddest of all, for my father, too. All I have left is my memories of him. And those will vanish when I do, if not before.

As I wrote about something else entirely, this hurts like violence.

I haven’t been sleeping. In the last five nights I’m only up to, I think, about 19 hours of sleep. It started with a quick check of the time on my phone, the morning of his last day. I saw a message from the family member who’d been keeping me updated. I unlocked my phone. I read the message. A few days earlier, he’d been given a week to live – maybe two. Her early-morning message said he’d taken a turn for the worse. He likely only had hours left. She was right: he lived about 13 more. He slept thru most of it. He died in his sleep. He didn’t suffer.

Last night, I finally fell asleep sometime after 6:30am. I woke up at 12:30, from a deep sleep. It wasn’t enough. My sleep isn’t restful. It isn’t restorative. Sleeping more wasn’t an option. I got up, showered, dressed, then sat back down for hours. On Twitter, I explained it:

It seems like walking and doing a couple minor but productive things will be distracting.

Every time I’ve gotten up the gumption to stand, my eyes have started to water and my energy/motivation craters – an utterly crushing sensation. For the first time since he died, I just want to sleep forever.

That’s no doubt partially due to the less than 20 hours of sleep (~19) I’ve had this week, when sleeping has seemed like the last thing I wanted to do. Like cheating. An interruption to remembering. An inappropriate luxury.

The waves just continue to roll in, one after another, lashing the blinking moments of quietude.

Walking would be good. I do not wanna cry in public. Dilemma. (That could work as the monstrous equation governing my current existence. You could substitute “working” for “walking”)

It isn’t, exactly, but this feels like whining. He’d hate this. So would I. And yet here we are. He can’t complain and I don’t have a choice.

Twitter, I added, is basically talking to yourself in public....

———

To one of my cousins, I pointed out that you can’t know something until you know it:

“I anticipated the pain, assumed the long preparation would ease it some, and perhaps it has, but I didn’t anticipate its intensity. It’s much worse and more varied than I ever guessed.

I’ve long heard people talk about how the emotions, the stages of grief, don’t move in order; that they repeat, reverse, flip in and out of sequence. But it was all anecdotal, not my first-hand experience.”

You can’t really know something until you know it.

Being my first experience with death, I’ve learned a couple big things. Things I’d rather not know. One of them is often related; it has been talked about at least since antiquity. That is that real learning comes from suffering. That when we suffer – and when do we suffer more than after losing loved ones? – we reach understandings that nature has withheld from us prior. We know the contours of them; maybe we can sketch their borders. But it’s the pain of suffering, of loss, that gives us access, that opens the horrible doors and pulls us in. As one door closes, others open, and all are evil.

To my cousin, I continued:

“Yesterday, whenever that was, I just felt numb all day. I had a couple distracting conversations. My sister and I chatted off and on all day. I was between Facebook postings. But I only cried a couple/few times. Consequently, I felt guilty all day - which is its own kind of distraction. At night, just sitting there, I absentmindedly let my thoughts drift toward the future, and the pain that followed.... I found the third rail. And it’s radioactive.

Today, the day after, I woke up crying and bawled for the first several hours of the day. I wrote another Facebook post, trying to get out in words what I cannot comprehend inside, and have been drained all day since.”

———

It’s been 99 hours.

———

In a subsequent talking-to-myself Twitter thread, I expanded on some things I’ve learned, since he died:

I expected there to be worse days and (comparatively) better days. But there aren’t better days. There are only different, new varieties of terrible.

In some, it’s total shock; in some, a deep sense of loss, of emptiness; some are guilt-ridden; some are numb; some aqueous; some torturously wistful; some a grotesque admixture of everything and swings between them(; etc.).

Then, as earlier, I quoted Æschylus. I also tried to cheer myself up, to distract myself enough that I could finish getting ready, and finally leave my apartment:

“And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of god.”

I could do without the wisdom, frankly. These are understandings I didn’t require.

––

Hey, look: more fitting Æschylus quotes:

“To speak is pain, but silence too is pain,
and everywhere is wretchedness.”

––

“[W]hen the heart is sorrowful, to speak
to those who would let fall a tear
is time well spent.

––

“You think you live in citadels grief cannot reach.”

––

I keep looking at my Æschylus quotes. I’m... it’s possible he was actually writing to me:

“Time shall teach him, gray time,
that teaches all things.”

I do not consent! I do not submit!

“Submit, you fool. Submit.
In agony learn wisdom.”

Keep your god damned wisdom. Shove it up your ass’ hole.

––

“Prometheus Bound” really is fucking incredible, especially if your thinking tends toward the darker, more honest sides of reality. I’d prefer my wisdom from authors. Grief can go rotate.

———

It’s been 100 hours. Four-plus days.

I feel like I’ve aged more than four days in the last four days.

終