Sometimes I get emotional at surprising times. Right now, I'm all worked up about death.
I was watching "10.5", the awful disaster movie that was on last night. It's only worth watching if you like watching the Seattle Space Needle collapse, or the Golden Gate Bridge tear apart. Being from the Bay Area, I do.
I like to wrap up lose ends. The hardest question in my life has always been "what if?". What if I had done this, or wrote that? This is often bad after relationship, but at least then you can often have limited contact to try to make things right, or convince yourself that's permanently broken.
There's a scene in "10.5" in which a minor character dies, having fought with her husband that same morning, with no way to patch things up now. For the rest of time, her last words with him will be ones of anger.
Death is something else. Once a loved one dies, there's no way to go back and fix things. When my maternal grandmother died, I became obsessed with whether I had sent her a final Christmas card. I thought about it constantly for weeks after her death, trying to find a memory of sending her that card. The action of sending the card would have been routine -- there was no reason for me to realize that months later I would need that memory to calm myself. It was as sort of craziness: grandma was neither sentimental nor religious; I doubt that she would have cared; but I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was terribly depressed.
Months later, my father found the Christmas card I had sent, which was a huge relief.
More recently, my great aunt Julia died. I was very fond of her, and had visited her a number of times in her slightly-remote apartment in the Bronx. Growing up on the West Coast, I'm not close to many members of my East Coast-centric family, but I was close to her.
She became suddenly ill about half a year ago, and I paid less attention than I should have. I had other responsibilities, and my grandfather thought her hospitalization was not going to be her final one.
By the time we realized how serious this was, she wasn't conscious and there was no way I could call her. There was no way to make up for the visits I hadn't made at the end. I dutifully attended her funeral, but what does she care? I falied her during the time when it would have made a difference.
There's nothing I can do about it now, and to be honest, my distractions at the time were important ones, affecting others I love. I felt horrible after her death, but now it took watching "10.5" to remind me of my shame, and my sorrow.
Adam