There's something in the human brain that can't accept death very well. We come up with rituals and afterlife myths and all sorts of things and I think it's because of our innate setup where we have to think we know everything. So people chat with someone they've never met online and think they love them. Or people look at someone and because of a physical characteristic they know how to predict their behavior. The people in our lives fill a lot of space in it and when they go that space is a vacuum in a system that cannot abide a vacuum.
So when someone you love dies it's an impossible thing. That person can't be gone. It can't be true. It will go back to normal soon, they'll come back. Huge waves of sobbing loss-driven pain overwhelm you and then you feel better. You have dreams where they come to visit you. You imagine them with you, their spirits, their souls, touching you in a way that makes you feel they're back and the pain is gone. You go into the closet and smell the clothes they wore once and then hung up, every day just a little, knowing that what you're smelling are molecules that came off of or out of their body and that that is the last physical part of them you're ever going to have. Then they don't smell anymore and the pillows don't smell anymore and finally, finally, finally your brain lets you admit that they're not there anymore and the waves come less often and then over time it gets better.
I saw _Longtime Companion_ a month after my lover died. What was I thinking. I didn't know. It was difficult, the deathbed scene was difficult and not, because I'd been there and I knew I could do it and the tears didn't back up and then come rushing out but instead they just started and flowed the way they had been for the last six months. And crying a lot was a good thing, every time I cried I felt better.
And then all of a sudden there was the fantasy, the filling of the vacuum, the feeling I could never get to after a really long crying jag, the impossible possible but not possible and I still don't know if it was a good thing or a cruel thing they did by adding that scene. Someone said "it needed to have a happy ending" and I thought how wrong they were, how it wasn't happy but instead made me go there again when I was working so hard to not need that fantasy to just barely survive and hold onto what everyone was saying "it gets better slowly and you don't forget them, you remember the good stuff and lose the pain" and I wanted to be there so bad, so so bad, like I had to but I couldn't and so I'd cry more, but then there it was! it was happening! it was possible but not possible but there it was and I could touch it in fantasy just for a moment.
I think in terms of things that made me cry, the uncontrollable sobbing indicates that that was the most thing that made me cry.
Ernie cries more than I do at sentimental stuff. I love that we cry at the same things.
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