The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Notes -
My grandmother died at the start of the month, after a long year of close brushes with death. I wasn't there for the bitter end - I was in Sydney while she rotted away on the other side of the world, crippled by a tumour she would never get over.
The last time I ever saw her, it was over a call. She wasn't responsive enough to say anything or even give any indications that she was there, and it was disconcerting to see just how unrecognisable she was. The way she looked was halfway between human and mummified corpse. Her eyes were half-open and defocused, and her arm, now shaped like a long, attenuate claw, jerked up and down haphazardly. My family tried to convince me she could still hear and understand; they were almost certainly lying either to me or to themselves, drawing spurious correlations out of random noise so they could hope there was something there.
Even if she could hear me, everything I could say would just have been a pathetic insult. "How are you doing?" Terrible, thanks. "I hope people are taking care of you well." My catheter is uncomfortable, and the nurses won't do anything about it. "I've been pretty good on my end." Fuck off. I ended up telling her about my day, and the last thing I said to her was something laughably trivial and inconsequential, hilariously stupid in hindsight. There was nothing particularly graceful or poignant or even sad about it. I was never close to her - quite the opposite; she had done a good number of ethically questionable or downright repulsive things during her life - but seeing someone I once knew turn into a flesh puppet, flailing around aimlessly on the bed like a poorly rigged 3D model, was profoundly disturbing in a way that's hard to articulate.
Shortly after the call ended, a blackout fell over my apartment building. This had never happened here before, and it was night time so the entire room was blanketed in darkness - all there was to do was sit in the silence and think. Walking out into the corridor presented a scene from a horror movie; the halls of the building were lit with a strange liminal yellow-orange light, and the background hum of the building - which I usually take for granted - had completely died out. It took two or three hours for the power to come back on.
A couple hours after the call and the strange blackout, my grandmother died. It appears her husband took her death extremely badly. He initially seemed in denial about what had happened - he was surprised to realise her body was cold, and refused to let the undertakers take her away, snapping at anyone who tried. For a while he kissed and slept beside her deteriorating corpse, and by the time they managed to pry her away from him she was disintegrating so badly they had to rush out a cremation. Her ashes are now in an urn at the home she once lived.
Ever since then, this has popped up repeatedly in my mind. I'm not even in mourning - I'm more relieved that people can start moving on now, since everyone was being held in stasis for the longest time - rather, it's something else. I've thought about death a lot, but the existential dread of seeing someone wither away like that is really potent, and the weird, coincidental timing of the blackout doesn't help. I certainly won't try to find any meaning in it; that would be doing the same thing my family did when they insisted she could still understand, but this is probably one of the most terrifying coincidences that has happened in my life, and I am still rattled by it despite my agnostic nature.
I don't know if I should even post this, to be honest. If this comment gets deleted later, don't be surprised.
EDIT: Thanks to everyone for sharing their condolences and their experiences with the death of family, it's much appreciated. I don't think I'm going to delete this now, but it did feel strange posting about something so personal on an anonymous online forum.
My condolences. You surely know this already, but if you are blessed enough to live long, you will see a similar tableau many times over--relatives, your own parents, acquaintances, and friends. I could quote a poem to you, and almost did just that as a reply, but it seems dull to do so.
Delete if you want but I think this site needs a bit more personal raw honesty about concrete matters and your post certainly qualifies.
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