Brace Yourself for Final Impact
Some people leave an imprint; some people leave a scar. What will you leave?
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When a celebrity dies, if the person in question has, in some way, touched a finger to your temple and held it there with purpose, the impression left will raise upon your psyche like a welt. Hot and itchy, it will spark and arc and light a wail, and at that moment you might think it’s all about them, but really, it’s about you.
It makes an impression, but their death leaves no permanent scar.
Perhaps their impact on you was the pleasure of their words, speaking things you could only dream of, expressing thoughts you could not. Perhaps it was their melody, cocooning your heart with such joy and love that you considered them the most important thing at that time, in the moment or forever, making you who you are, what you became, and what you will always be. You, you, you.
Actions, influence, expression. The way they swung their craft around your head, mesmerizing and hypnotizing, before the swift whip-crack of their gift landed in your world. Now gone. The cracking sound lingers. They live on through their work, forever immortalized, and easily accessible.
You read about it in the paper. You hear it in the wind. Their passing is announced with fevered reverence by newsmakers and influencers and via little missives in the ether. All the signals and wires of modern-day communication. And while you may trip on these wires and stumble you do not fall forever into a dark cave of mourning.
It is not an ache that will never leave your bones, but in the moment of passing, the punch and shove of it may startle you. You may wish to eulogize the impact in some way. To make your spiritual connection—the importance—be known by the masses. To express what they meant. To you. Their relationship with your life, never extending beyond the fleeting and peripheral, has laid at least one brick. Within you. You may want people to know.
But the imprint, no matter how culturally or emotionally important, will not halt your movement. It will not incapacitate you. It will not disrupt your momentum.
When a parent dies, the culmination of history once heavy on the shoulders is released as an enormous sigh. Grief? Relief? It depends and sometimes it’s both. But a weight that has been building since the day of your birth, gladly shouldered and forever embedded, finds its final storage shed of ideal size and you hoist that weight out and across the yard of your life and to it.
The door to that shed will remain ajar for occasional visits, but it will be an offsite visitation, often at specific times of the year or as dictated by a life-moments calendar.
This sounds cold, but only because the impact and impression of them on your life are so ingrained, so built into the fabric of you, that even while their memory may be in that back shed, that back shed is in you.
In youth, the weight is carried by ignorance. Blind faith in the always-ness of presence. There is no uncoupling, no unhitching of the load, even if it does occur via distance and change of location. Emotionally, it never will. The connection—or the imprint if you prefer—is one of DNA and cannot be contracted out to others.
In adulthood, the weight of what’s to come and its eventual release will get heavier upon your shoulders, whispering in your ear (with increasing urgency and volume) to “Be aware. IT is coming.”
We all know what IT is. There is a door slowly closing here, the slow creak of it inching closer to shut becomes louder as your awareness of their frail mortality increases over time.
It is a heavy door.
There is much weight to it.
The weight of a door. The weight that manifests itself upon your shoulders. So much weight and heft and volume. The shape of it varies with each person, but the divots from its attach points leave a mark. Deeper and deeper as your life progresses.
These are parental memory marks, left for your own survival. They remind you to breathe and check both ways before crossing the street and to be kind and to not chew the ends of pens. To carry your load lightly.
But memory marks are not imprints. They are embeds planted into the soul and heart and mind of you.
Each lesson learned, each victory logged, every perceived disappointment highlighted, and all pieces of emotional baggage filled, closed, and stored in an endless rack of storage slots. The random access memory of the Embed Mainframe.
Depending on the status of your relationship with them, when a parent dies, you will hear it quickly. First hand. A call from a sibling perhaps. You may even be in the room and watch them go. The reality will rush at you. You will be barrel rolled even if it is, to some degree, a relief.
It is a passing of a torch. It is the passing of time. It is the sudden realization that you are either halfway, or all the way, an orphan.
So dramatic. All things must end, they say. The physical connection must be severed. It is the way of the cycle, and this one WILL leave a mark. How that mark manifests in your life or on your body is complicated. You will work it out.
The door closes. The door has closed. You will have no wish to eulogize and yet it’s impossible not to. The weight is the weight. Warm touches of love to a brow, bruises to an ego, a lifetime of emotional scratches, and soothing those rashes of expectation, or total abandonment. All or none of these things. With each minute passing the weight lifts but the memory settles in for the endless afternoon tea with your heart.
No one can escape this. If you were ever born, you will eventually drink tea.
When a friend dies, there is disbelief. There is a shock. There is the dropped jaw, “huh?” of life being life and moving on with no regard for your feelings. A flood of friendship memory carves ravines into your brain with the grief of it. Flashes of the things you did together, the stupid conversations, and the moments of laughter and shared melancholy and rescue from sticky situations. Whether it’s been ten years or ten days since you saw them last, it won’t matter—the moments will replay on your memory screen in full I-Max clarity.
The childhood friend. The escapades and secret missions you think your parents never knew about (they did). The college friend. The discovering of the world together and fending for yourselves and facing things you think your parents don’t care about (they do). The adult friend. The life unfolding and moving on and reality biting and sharing of the outcomes and perhaps becoming parents yourselves.
Friend. Their imprint on you is subtle and important. This loss may leave a scar, but depending on the proximity, it may also leave something far worse.
It will leave a hole.
You hear about this passing in many ways—all of them suck. All of them are shocking. There will be the initial memory of the friendship, followed swiftly by the formation of the chasm. The void. This new friend-shaped hole in your life. Your friend’s parting gifts will be the impression they made, the impact that they had, and the mark they left in your ledger.
And, if you are around the same age as your friend, there will also be a bonus gift—the awareness of your own ticking clock.
You will realize (even if you sort of knew it and just never acknowledged it) that if Death took them, Death can just as easily take you. And Death will take you, just as nonchalantly as it took your friend. You have no control. You do not get to write the script. Death follows stage directions you, a mere mortal, are not privy to.
All of this to say: Make a good impression on Life so when Death comes, it feels bad about cutting you from the cast.
(And also, call your friends.)
When love dies—meaning a spouse, a partner, a lover, not the thought of love—evidence widely supports that the individual left behind will be crippled by this loss. It is total devastation. This is 100% scar, not impression. Deep. Long-lasting. Visible to all.
A devastating tsunami of no more rides up the shore to engulf all your houses and beloved gardens and this life you built together wholly and with love. Once flooded, Death viciously rips and claws everything back and away from you to store in the dark abyss of its cloak. Everything is a sucking sound of something powerful caught in the undertow. You are beaten and bloodied by sharp debris as the presence of your love is torn away.
But Love does not die. Love, so entwined and in cahoots with Death, takes its blade and severs all arteries, slices the heart in many creative ways, and sharply—expertly—applies its scars like a surgeon with a degree from The Blunt Scalpel School of Medicine. But it does not die.
Scars upon scars upon scars, puckering and laying down. These are painful to the touch, but over time will become warm with pleasant memory.
It is a paradox. These are confusion scars. You are horrified by them yet need and want them all. You fret that they may forever fade. You touch them often to remind you of an existence no more. These scars are armaments against forgetting, not ornaments of pain.
This is not a death that is heard about on some far-off channel. You feel it. It is loud and angry and unjust and dumb. It doesn’t make you think “Ahh, ain’t life funny?” It doesn’t prompt you to eat better. It doesn’t make you want to sign up for a marathon. It makes you understand what grief really is. This imprint, this impression, this embed of forever memory. This is impact. This is your planet hitting an asteroid, heading straight for the center of the sun.
It makes you see life for what it is: Brutal and indiscriminate. And that Love is a gift that underwrites it all.
When I die, I will, my will, will go. I will not know.
Death knows no prejudice. It is an equal opportunity employer. Husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, relatives. Friends, lovers, neighbors, colleagues, rich people, poor people, all of them. Those you barely know, those you know very well. They all must go and go they will.
When Death appears, people disappear. Death lingers, always looking for opportunity, and while this whole business may depress you and make you feel powerless, remember this:
It is not it is the imprint of Death we feel upon us when someone dies.
It is the imprint of Life.
We feel the weight of this life. We feel the volume of that soul. The imprint, like a thumb pressed hard into the flesh of your arm and released, will come back in that moment.
That is not death. That is life.
When you die, you have no awareness of your impact. You will not attend your own memorial, nor hear your own eulogy. You will not see your own casket or choose where your ashes will go or get to experience the grief others may have for you.
You will not see if anyone feels their arm for your imprint.
But I hope you leave a mark.
Yours in tiny thought,
Janeen
This week’s amends…
“I don’t begrudge any artist for getting an audience. I’m sorry, I never found that poverty meant purity.”- David Bowie, from a Tony Visconti interview that used to be on YouTube but is now gone so I can’t link to it. #SadFace
On Rotation: “Space Girl” by Shirley Collins
The use of miniatures in movies was dying out. Filmmakers like Wes Anderson have
Via Storythings
Slot machine fever! “But this invention, this brainchild of the boffins…”
Via Messy Nessy’s 13 Things I Found on the Internet Today