Comments on: There’s something about death I don’t understand.

By: Nick Snyder Columbus ohio

Nick Snyder Columbus ohio — Thu, 14 Jun 2018 13:25:19 +0000

Nice to read that someone doesn’t see death the same way as many other do. I’ve always believed death is only temporary and we all meet again in another life cycle, another time. Rainbow theory made me see death as something that’s only temporary.

By: Haley Chapman

Haley Chapman — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 03:48:36 +0000

In reply to Evan. That's a good way to look at it. Maybe we don't focus on the bad things anymore because we miss them. I think of my mom often but I don't give a lot of thought to our arguments just thoughts about when we did this. I still use present tense j often wonder if people think I'm weird.

By: Haley Chapman

Haley Chapman — Thu, 05 Oct 2017 03:43:03 +0000

I think the same way that the death didn’t happen and they are sonewhere bjust not here

By: Mel Baggs

Mel Baggs — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 01:43:02 +0000

In reply to Carly.

Yes, his death was very difficult for me because you couldn’t separate the good from the bad. Skipping rocks and having my breasts groped. Sailing on his boat while he told dirty stories. Hanging out in his garden while he gleefully mimicked the sound of cats yowling as they died. It was all tied together, there was no separating the good from the bad. And that’s my memory of him, to this day. Complicated. I can’t take the one without the other.

The one thing that I remember though… he really didn’t want my parents marrying. They met when my mom was 15 and my dad was 20. They got engaged at that age. My grandfather made her wait to finish high school. And he never approved of my father. But just before he died, he took my father for a walk in the woods. He thanked my father for making my mother happy, and he apologized for making them wait to be married. That was the first inclination I got that he had the capacity for compassion.

By: Carly

Carly — Sat, 31 May 2014 23:04:46 +0000

Oh wow, I sortof found this forum a little late, just realized everyone else’s comments were from 2010! Just was sort of googling last night for something to relate to b/c I just had some guys I work with pass away in a really nasty accident while I was on a different project, and was having a little trouble coping. The ironic thing is I’ve always felt the same as the first thing you described, but what I was looking for was the second, and you just happened to feel the same about both. I can’t imagine your experience, especially the conflicting part about having good times with him- it’s so incomprehensible that someone could have ‘good parts’ and still be so horrible in other ways. Maybe the reason people remember people who die without their faults is that they are really dealing with their own insecurities and fear of death. Maybe the hope is that people will remember them as better than they were, and forgive them for their faults when they die.

By: Mel Baggs

Mel Baggs — Sat, 31 May 2014 06:41:42 +0000

In reply to Carly. Thank you. It helps to know there are others like me. At the time I didn't want to say it because I didn't want to disturb others' mourning, but my grandfather took me out to skip rocks one day, and instead he groped my breasts and told me how great it made him feel to touch little girls' breasts. And that was actually the least of some of the bad things he'd done, I found out as I grew older and listened to him tell stories about how he hurt animals for fun. When he died, I had to deal not only with the usual emotions around a family member dying, but also how to deal with grieving relatives when I knew that I wasn't feeling that bad that he couldn't touch any more little girls or torture any more cats. I basically decided to shut up and let everyone grieve, which is probably the wisest choice, but in private I felt my own feelings which were much more complicated. Because there were things I do miss about him. And there were great times we had together. And I can still remember those things. But they were all entangled with the bad. Which is the sort of person he was, some good things entangled with some things that were completely horrible, beyond ordinary badness.

By: Carly

Carly — Sat, 31 May 2014 04:03:36 +0000

Wow…..this makes me feel better. I am the same way- I hate it when people talk about how great a person was when everyone knows they were a bastard. I mean, I understand that people are grieving and I wouldn’t say something negative to them, but I feel like there is nothing at all wrong with being honest about who a person really was. We are all faults and strengths woven into one, and pretending that faults didn’t exist isn’t really mourning the person that passed. And I seem to have this issue with not being able to understand that someone is gone- I get the fact of death, but I don’t feel any different necessarily. It makes me sad that I can’t access the person but I feel like they are just somewhere else distant from me. I feel like part of the reason I don’t understand is I’ve never been with someone as they died or seen them after. I’m not sure that would change how I feel or think. But I definitely feel you and I don’t think the first part makes you a bad person, just an honest one. The second part just makes you like me, I suppose.

By: A Year Ago at Shift Journal | Neurodiversity

A Year Ago at Shift Journal | Neurodiversity — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 07:09:00 +0000

[…] Shift Journal, Autism and Aboriginal Society. Original essay (excerpted), from Ballastexistenz, There’s something about death I don’t understand. For further possible examples of Bateson and Lehman’s take on primary process—or, the world as […]

By: Melody

Melody — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 05:44:28 +0000

I haven’t had anyone close to me die, but for years I had difficulty comprehending why people used the past tense for a deceased person, didn’t get it until maybe age 15, and still have trouble with that convention. While linguistically I do that similarly as you describe, my thought processes behind it seem dissimilar.

By: Rylee

Rylee — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 05:13:26 +0000

Amanda, i also have had this sense of people ever since i can remember. When my paternal grandfather, who was very mean to me, died, i shed not one tear, and made no effort to even pretend that i was sad. People looked at my face and concluded that the face i was exhibiting was grief, when in fact i think i was scared my equally horrible grandmother would notice i wasn’t weeping. She assumed i was too overwhelmed to let my feelings out. She then engulfed me in a hug which left me just as distraught as if she had chastised me for not grieving. I just wanted to be left alone. I managed to keep my mouth shut throughout the whole horrifying funeral and subsequent family gathering, and avoid being grilled about how much i missed my grandfather, which i didn’t of course. I had told my father several days before, when he brought it up, that his father was unkind to me and i was glad he was dead. My father simply said, “I understand your feeling that way”. This was enormously compassionate of him. When he died a few years ago, i grieved that i wouldn’t see him again where we could actually talk to each other, or that i could hug him (as a child, my parents were the only people i could bear to have hug me, and later came to appreciate that. I hated being kissed by anyone, however, and they weren’t so compassionate about that!)After my father died, i also at times felt a good deal of anger toward him, because he had at times been pretty harsh toward me, and his decisions about inheritance had been based much on the fact that my brother had been “successful” and i had not. So, i had unfiltered conflicting emotions about him to process, where most others didn’t seem to see anything but the absolute angelic about him. He was an enormously giving person, but there were occasionally times that he seemed to echo his mother, in saying really horrible unkind things just out of the blue. He never knew about my Dx, though. I processed through all of that eventually. One thing another ASD friend of mine said to me a while back that might be relevant, is that our feelings don’t go through the kind of filtering that NTs’ feelings do. That makes a great deal of sense to me.
@First Lee, i think that besides being about making things up about people after they’re dead, if i read what Amanda’s saying rightly, she’s talking about being inside the temporal construct when you’re alive, and outside of it once you’re dead. My own take on that is that MATTER (a body) is what locks us into that, and that once we’re disconnected from that, the person is disconnected from linearity. Unfortunately, the deceased person is also pretty much locked out of relating to other people, as well. It has seemed to me, from what i’ve read, that you don’t have to believe in God to believe in temporal non-linearity, as there are many physicists who do so, at least do so without believing in God as popularly conceived.