The names of the past rise

Grief arrives in an instant. Healing hides in the shadows.

News traveled at a much slower speed when I was young. It could have been from a phone call, a conversation at the corner store, or through a notice in the newspaper; whatever the means, a message would make its way to us.

Bad news was often met with the same reaction: “That’s awful. He was so young.”

We all knew what it meant before we knew what it was. Someone passed. A former coworker, a relative still in Italy, or a promising young goalie who sped into a curve. All were equally sad.

When you’re young, the concept of time eludes you. If someone dies at 45, a child may consider that to be along, fulfilling life.

You assume people that age are expected to die. Maybe it doesn’t seem so bad, but you’re wrong. It always is. Especially since 45 is not old at all.

I remember seeing my grandfather in what turned out to be his hospital deathbed. My dad took me to the hospital but I never got a clear view of him — well, not that I remember, anyway. Tubes were everywhere and accompanied by strange mechanical whirling. I thought it was funny.

I had no frame of reference. I had never seen anything like it. I certainly did not understand what seeing him like that really meant. I could not grasp the concept, and I did not understand the context.

As a kid who had not yet experienced tragedy, one thing was clear: The people you don’t know die and it’s awful. They were so young. Your family and friends live forever.

The world is different now. There is virtually no lag between the inception of an event and the communication of it. That picture of your friend’s cat was taken moments earlier. Your little cousin’s high school graduation is being streamed live on YouTube. It’s all happening right now. You can see and hear it without ever being there. Sometimes, you can even feel it. It’s remarkable.

Louis C.K. had a bit about the miracle of flight and how everyone on a plane should be constantly amazed. You are sitting in a chair magically soaring through the sky. It provided a lot of perspective.

In the nine-or-so years since then, the world changed again. Everything is somehow faster and smaller in form but bigger in scope. It’s amazing and jarring.

In Louis C.K.’s world, we were all rushing to set up our social media profiles. Facebook and Twitter hosted a constant race of who could post some bit of information the quickest, as if we were in charge of breaking the news.

Harambe died today. How sad.

It was incredibly frustrating. That feeling, along my misfiring synapses pushed me to ritualistically purge and binge social media accounts. The most recent iteration took place just months ago.

Over time, you realize that it is not the expedience of sharing information that is jarring; it’s that information persists.

Maybe your old account is gone and you regret losing uploaded photos, but now you are faced with something new and unexpected. Old connections pop up as suggested friends, but you realize they are gone. So young, so awful. Truly, truly awful. The names of the past rise in front of you and you’re not quite sure what to do with that.

The smiling face of a relative lovingly holding her grandchildren is not only gone, but so is your digital connection to her. Their memories are now locked behind the binary toggle of a friend request.

Those moments outlived them and now haunt those who still see it.

Amid text messages about about a baseball game, your father sends me a Google search result page for a funeral home. You don’t quite know what it is, but you know what it means: the fragility of life has revealed itself once again.

A Christian funeral service mixes grieving with celebration. We should be happy for the person who passed; they now moved onto a utopian afterlife, reunited with the family and friends who preceded them.

Sadness is reserved for those who remain, those who have yet to venture into the beyond. This is true. Those of us who persist are the only ones who can grieve.

A cousin of mine has never been one to hold back his thoughts. Reservations escape him. When news spread of my brush with suicide, he called me. He never asked if I was okay or if there was anything he could do for me. Instead, he hollered at me and told me how selfish I was. He had every right to do so.

The intentional end of life leaves additional burdens on your loved ones. They have to deal with the fallout, and they carry the knowledge and gravity of your action with them every day.

What could I have done differently? Why did I do wrong? How did I not see the signs?

That anguish knows no bounds.

In any death, there is trauma. Memories live on, but so does the knowledge that new ones can never be created. You carry the loved one in your heart, but it aches terribly. Time does not heal the scars, it merely covers them. They endure.

That pain is something you experience even when the loss is not yours. As you see a loved in mourning, you wonder what you could do to help them. There has to be something you can say to ease the pain. You can provide a shoulder for their weary head, or offer small gestures of kindness to drown out life’s noise, but you cannot help them.

The feeling of grief is immediate, but the process of healing is long and sad.