#quit thought

TW for people sensitive to this topic.

I have been *trying* to write a book for some time. The main topics are grief, death, pain, sadness and loneliness. These are topics I thought I understood quite well for I’m a very lonely person myself. The part about death was the hardest because (to me) the “interesting” part is that no one understands death. On internet there’s always “how to explain to your child the death of a loved one” kind of articles, but how do exactly adults understand it?

I started that idea when I was a teen, and now I don’t think my perception of death have changed much tbh. Until…

These past couple of years have taken several family members. They were not really close to me and I have an odd way to deal with grief, but I’ve seen closer members cry their heart out and then be completely normal in a five minute range. I just thought “well, that’s normal I guess, everybody deals with grief in different ways” or so I’ve heard. And that was it. There haven’t been any especially experience where I have actually doubted existence or made me scream why to the universe.

This week, a frequent client of the Cafe I work for died suddenly of a heart attack. He was swimming in the ocean, he was on vacation, his heart suddenly stopped and drowned. Another client told me and I just couldn’t understand. He and I were not close at all, he was not my friend nor family, but it affected me in a strange way.

I keep remembering his face, the way he always asked me for an ashtray and I always forgot but he was always gentle and told me not to worry. His face when I asked him his name and looked so confused because he was an actor and probably felt odd that I didn’t know him already, but answered humbly even so. It’s just so weird not seeing him at his usual table, ordering the same wine and talking about some play he was writing with his mother. It’s like a glitch in the matrix, something’s missing, there’s a hole, something empty. how is it even possible? I just saw him last week. He was here and now there’s nothing in his place. That is what I think death is for us: a hole. Our minds can’t simply explain why the person who filled it is not there anymore.

I can’t imagine what it must feel with a person I actually knew and was close with.

I think harder now than before that it’s true that no one understands death exactly. As a writer, I wanna put all this little abstract feeling in my some-day-to-be book now that I have experimented a little bit different way to see death.

Do you have similar experiences? Is it true that every person deals with death in a different way or is it always kinda the same and I’m a weird one? Which is not bad I guess. I wanna think I’m not that different and everyone is trying to name something there’s no words for. There’s not even “grief” in my language, but I love that word in the English vocabulary. It just explains the sentiment better and closer to what it feels.