When you witness death.

I went to support group last night. You know where you and other people go to talk to each other about their problems. Our problem is death, specifically that we have kids who have had a parent die, which in most cases means we have had a spouse die. What a sucky group to be a part of huh.  There were some new people there so everyone goes around and tells their story, you know why they ended up in this group. Who died. So I told my story, I do this often, I even blog about it for the whole world to see. I have actually gotten pretty good at 'glossing' over it, I guess it's a skill you learn after time. I can say "My husband died two and a half years ago, he had a siezure, and I watched him die. We have a ten year old daughter" Most times now I can say it without even crying, see I have gotten good. Tonight though, for some reason I don't really know, I went into a lot of detail about the night Dan died. That's much harder, I could not do that one without crying.

My grandpa was in WWII. He was a 'foot' soldier who was drafted. I guess he walked around Germany. I'm not positive because he hated talking about his time in the war and very rarely did it. One day his group (I believe around 12 people) were walking through a hay field and got fired on.  Grandpa got shot and then crawled behind a hay stack. He was the only survivor that day.  He hated war, he hated shooting, he hated death. He was a pretty reasonable guy. As such he would never watch a movie or T.V. show that had anything at all to do with those topics. I remember countless times my dad saying "No grandpa won't watch that movie it's about war" or "No grandpa won't like that movie somebody dies" I thought I understood, he had been there, of course he didn't like it.  I'm sure it was awful, of course he didn't want to talk about it. I may have understood before but I didn't really get it. Now though, now I get it.

When you see death with your own eyes, not just know it happened, or see it on TV, but actually see it, actually be there, it puts you in a different realm. You see all death after so differently.  Really one of the best examples of this is in Harry Potter (Baby Girl and I are reading about it right now)   In the beginning of the Harry Potter series the kids are taken to school in magic carriages that pull themselves.  In book five Harry is astounded to see these skeletal horse things  pulling the carriages. He asks his friends why the carriages don't magically pull themselves anymore and no one knows what he's talking about. Harry wonders if he's finally lost his mind and is seeing things. Later in the book he learns that those horse creatures are indeed real, and as a matter of fact have always pulled the carriages.  Harry learns that they are a magical creature that can only be seen by people who have witnessed death. Which is like three people in the whole school. Harry was unfortunate enough to see his friend cedric die the previous year.  So know he can see the Thestrals. J.K. Rowling really sums it up very nicely, you see things differently once you've seen death. You are now looking at the world through a different lens, it may look the same to everybody else, but it's different now. You can not really describe a Thestral unless you have seen a Thestral, nobody wants to but some people are forced to. The world looks different once you've seen death, you don't want it to but it does now, you can't see it any other way.

Confession time: there was yet another mass shooting today. It took me until about 6pm to even know something had happened. You know what I did when I found out. I tried really really hard to ignore it. I refused to watch the news, I scrolled through posts on it as fast as I humanly could. I didn't want it in there, I didn't want more death in my brain or in my heart. I've already seen too much.  Everybody whose harts are breaking on social media, it hurts, it hurts bad, you understand the pain in the world. You understand, you can sympathize  but you don't get it, count yourself lucky. It's a whole different club, it's those who can see the Thestrals and those who can't yet. I wish I was in the latter.

Dan died of a siezure, he didn't get shot, guns were never a part of our lives. My grandpa watched everyone around him get shoot and die. They are totally different situations, but the pain of death is still there. I can't really watch Grey's anatomy anymore, too many people on there have seizures. I can still watch a war movie although it is rather uncomfortable.  My grandpa choose to just stay away from death as much as he could. He did it on purpose and although I can't confirm it with him (he himself died a few years ago) I suspect whether he subconsciously knew it or not that he stayed away from all those movies and TV shows  so that when he needed to be present, when death came at him as he watched his wife, and then a daughter, and then another daughter all die, he could be there. Sometimes you can go into detail about it and sometimes you have to just gloss over the surface of it for your own sanity.  Sometimes you can't bare other peoples pain so that you can bare your own. 

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry of Castle