As I sit writing this, my grandmother lies on her deathbed. Cancer metastasized from her gall bladder to her liver and now a woman who never had more than a glass or two of wine in one sitting lies withered, deep-yellow skin hanging loosely on tired bones; so weak she can no longer move her body; can no longer consume any kind of calories or even water without gagging; her own speech eluding her.
The fact that this woman, my Grandma Dolly, the best human being I’ve ever known, has been slowly creeping toward these final moments for the last month or so seems incredibly unfair to me. My Grandma Dolly doesn’t deserve to suffer for one moment ever, and yet sometimes death consumes and digests us in slow motion, like a snake methodically compelling oversized prey into its body.
Still, when an 80-year-old woman dies in her own bed surrounded by family, that’s the best one can hope for in the end. So when I think of my family’s impending loss compared to the recent Orlando nightclub shooting victims, their families, and countless others who met their demise due to violence, it seems selfish to be so upset by my grandmother’s natural suffering.
We tell ourselves that grandmas are supposed to die before us, but our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews are not. Still, losing a matriarch shakes the foundations of our lives as much as losing a young person reminds us in the most soul-shattering of ways that there are no guarantees for longevity; that our assumptions about what should be are as useful as a lily pad to a lion.
Forty-nine people in Orlando were needlessly robbed of their futures, their hopes, their choices; their vivaciousness snuffed out in a way that their families, nor any of us, will ever accept as the normal or acceptable end to a life. It’s an infinite wrong that all of those lives were cut short by the actions of one disturbed individual.
Such horrid ends make me think that where death is concerned, maybe it’s the families left behind that are both the fortunate and unfortunate ones in the long run. We carry our loved ones — and their manner of death — with us until the end of our own days.
Comparatively speaking, my grandma is lucky in her death. She had a full life and she accepts that it’s her time to die. She said so. Her acceptance makes it easier for me to let her go, a peace of mind no one related to a murder victim will ever have.
While my family will never be the same, my grandmother’s suffering is not accompanied by hate or violence, but is buffered by the love her big family and especially her eight children, who have all been by her side through this ordeal. That love has brought an unexpected element of beauty to the darkest of human experiences.
Though we never feel love more deeply then when it's lost, it’s because of love that we carry on after devastating losses. I hope that the survivors and the families of the victims in the most recent and deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history are surrounded by love in the difficult months to come.
This article appears in Jun 23-30, 2016.