In the middle of the night, I woke up filled with a sense of awe, a frequent experience in those last few days (along with feelings of utter exhaustion and lack of confidence that I could go on any longer). I got a few hours of sleep on the little couch in the room. On that particular night, I had said good night to him, although he was not responding to us anymore. When my father passed away in the summer of 2015, my sister and a dear family friend and I had been taking turns sleeping in the room with him in the hospital he had chosen for hospice care. Perhaps your memory of the death occurred because you were there when it happened. If a person we love is missing, then our brain assumes they are far away and will be found later. The question to consider is, Why do we believe we will find them? The idea that the person is simply no longer in this dimensional world, that there are no here, now, and close dimensions, is not logical.
Didion explains that she was unable to give away her deceased husband’s shoes, because “he might need them again.” Why would we believe that our loved ones will return, if we know that’s not true? We can find answers to this paradox in the neural systems of our brain, systems that produce different aspects of knowledge and deliver them to our consciousness. Another famous example of this belief comes from Joan Didion’s book The Year of Magical Thinking. They are not too emotionally frightened to accept the reality of the loss, nor are they in denial. People who say this are not delusional they simultaneously are able to explain that they know the truth. We hear this kind of statement quite often from those who are grieving.
It felt as though he was just away on another trip and would walk through their door again at any minute.
Over dinner one night, she shook her head as she told me it just did not feel like he was gone. As a prominent sleep researcher, her husband had traveled quite often to attend academic conferences. I spent some time with his widow in the months afterward. A few years ago, an older colleague of mine passed away.
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