I lost both parents in the last two years, and it still hurts like an open wound. Nothing prepares you for it. Nothing.

I think the idea of a new planet is akin to my experience: it is a new landscape, darker, something like walking through the negative of a photo of a landscape, while everyone else is walking through the positive of the photo of the landscape. The hardest part is the primitive part, I think. It depends of course on how well you and your loved one handled living and dying, but in talking to other people, many of them still feel different kinds of guilt. It doesn't matter what your conscious brain thinks: but it helps to bring them out into the open, and look at them, and think about them. One of the guilts is the feeling that you killed the person who died. It is deeply primitive, and one fights it, but there it is. A related guilt is that you are alive and they are dead. How dare I be alive while they are dead? By what right do I see the sky and they don't? There are other guilts, but those are the most primitive. Another one is the endlessly replayed idea that I could have done something more, something else. Even now, I have to stop myself thinking, what can I do for them to help? That is I think why they invented praying for people in Purgatory -- to salve that feeling that I should still be doing something for them, even though they are beyond my help.

Something else that happens is a new kind of fear -- I liken it to the moment in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers when the man yells at everyone -- Don't you know what is happening!! You feel in possession of a new truth, and that is that people die (in spite of the fact that everyone says they know it) and it is very frightening. As if you were a messenger from a different realm, bringing terrible news to everyone, news that they must hear, but that will kill them if they really hear it. You carry it around, like some poison vial: as if you would break open at any moment, and spread what you now know around.

Another strange thing is that things happen inside you that you have no ability to control. You simply start crying for no reason, out of the blue, in the middle of other things.

The worst, I think, is the dreams. Unless they are good dreams, they haunt you. They are true hauntings. They are not assimilateable like other dreams, they stop you cold, and I mean cold.

That may not resonate with you, but that is one person's report from the exploration of the new landscape you wander through, the valley of death.


yours,

Peter T.