Tingling Upon Closure

Reading drLove's testimony A Child Dies, I tried out her morbid thought experiment:

I think that I must be really weird because there are times when I rehearse in my mind each member of my close family dying in order to "prepare" for potential moments like those. My husband, or my oldest daughter or my youngest daughter. Weird huh?

Thinking about attending the funeral of my wife and daughter certainly evokes about the worst feeling I can imagine inside of me.

But at the same time that I pray never to witness such awful things, I believe that should I ever be faced with them, the incomprehensible pain I will feel will eventually subside and be replaced with the feeling of acceptance and closure.

My first taste in these matters occurred eight years ago when we buried my mother. She died at 68 of ALS -- much "too soon". Her death derailed me in a way I was not prepared for. After a couple of years of disorientation, I ended up with the belief about life and death that drLove eloquently states:

Energy is neither created nor destroyed, it just changes form. From life to death, this incredible energy within each and every one of us is liberated into the entirety of existence. ... I don't believe there will ever be an "I" on the other side. Not even a "We". There'll be something, but not anything that I could comprehend in my human mind right now.

The way I've said the same thing is that each of us is just one instantiation of infinte energy temporarily trapped in the decaying carcass known as our body. One day, that carcass will expire and be recyled back into the physical world. Meanwhile, the infinite energy that was us will merge back into the incomprehensible whole. 

Is this belief true? Who knows? I just know it's a comforting one for me.

How do I know that? Over the past couple of days, I attended funeral services for the father of my wife's sister's husband. With that sort of tenuous connection, it's safe to say I wan't really attached to the fellow -- although I did like him quite a bit.

Last Saturday morning, my father-in-law and I attended the memorial service. We sat in the back of the room until the service was over. At the end of the service, we were invited up to the open coffin at the front of the room to pay our respects.

As soon as I got in line, I started feeling pleasant tingles surging throughout my body. The closer I got to the coffin, the more intense these tingling sensations became. Indeed, I am getting those tingles again just writing this up.

What the heck is this tingling? It's not fear. Nor is it any of the tingling circumstances I previously listed in the recipe Shortcut to Tingling.

After thinking on the question awhile, I realized that what it was was the feeling of closure about my mother's death. This current funeral was the first I had attended since my mother's funeral eight years ago. Being back in a similar setting, but this time "armed" with the new set of beliefs described above, I felt nothing but transcendent peace. Standing at the coffin, I thought: "Have a nice trip back".

Interestingly a similar feeling of closure came upon me last summer when I visited my alma mater university in Canada. The school was holding festivities related to its 50th anniversary.

Back in the early 1980s when I went to school there, I played on a school team that reached the national final on three different years of my tenure there. Each of three years we lost in that final. Each time, we lost to the same school. Even worse, the quality of the other team declined every year. By the time they beat us for the third time, they beat with a bunch of ragtag players who wouldn't even be picked in a summertime pickup game. But when it counted, they still beat us.

Now if I had been an end-of-the-bench player on those teams, perhaps these three losses would have cost me no psychic burden. But, as it happened, I was about as central a figure as anyone in that extended Greek tragedy.

So for the ten years after I left school and entered the "real world", I would feel a jolt of discomfort whenever my thoughts turned towards my playing days in school. This jolt brought with it the taste of squandered opportunity, unfinished business, and irredeemable failure.

Ten years after school, this flinch seemed to go away. More accurately, it became subsumed by deeper feelings of pain. Ten years after school was when my first marriage crashed in divorce, and my mother began her death walk with ALS. In the face of all that, silly sporting losses from childhood seemed trivial. 

But that doesn't mean those "trivial" feelings went away. Rather, it seems they were just buried over in the rubble of my 30-something train wrecks. Buried over, that is, until I attended the 50th anniversary events last summer.

The long and short of it is that, as the festivities kicked off that summer weekend, I began feeling worse and worse. The festivities were wonderful and the collective mood was jovial. Sweet reverie was the order of the day. But as for me, I just kept feeling grumpier and grumpier. What was going on?

I stayed over at an old teammate's place after the festivities concluded. The two of us talked about my grumpy feelings. And just talking about them with him, that same feeling of closure came over me. Plesant tingling coursed throughout my body. Again, as I just wrote that, the tingling started all over.

Bottom line is that I am finally closed with my college sporting career. It was was it was. I feel I have an understanding of the systemic and personal dynanics that determined the results. Most important, I feel OK with all of it.

So now I am finally at peace with my mother's death and my "unsatisfying" college sporting career. Intellectually, I had came to an understanding of these two dynamics years before. But it wan't until these two events of 2007 -- the 50th anniversary festivities and that fellow's funeral -- that I finally felt closure. For me, that feeling is glorious tingling.