I’ve been fairly silent lately on the intertubes. For once it’s not my own laziness that’s caused my brief absence. On Friday May 8th my wife’s 29 year old cousin died unexpectedly. My wife comes from a big close-knit Greek family; this was a huge tragedy for the whole family. We immediately left for Atlanta to help out where we could and just to be there for the family. He was survived by both his parents and his 5 siblings. No parent should have to go through the death of a child. Parents are supposed to die first, that’s just the way it is, the way we expect the natural order of life to progress. Unfortunately, life and death don’t always comply with our wishes.

It was amazing and shocking to experience the emotional shock this event produced within myself. I have a not-so-secret secret to tell: death scares the living crap out of me. The daily anxiety that I deal with is nothing compared to the existential dread that washes over me like an ice cold waterfall when I try to contemplate my own demise.

I really didn’t intend to make this about myself. At times like these we try to be there to support loved ones.  But I think it’s also quite natural during these circumstances to imagine what would happen if you were put in the same situation. When a death occurs, people think about death and about life and what it all means. And since I can’t peer into others’ brains and know how their thinking about it, all I have to go on is how it affects me.

I may have mentioned this before, but I have chronic clinical depression.  I take meds everyday to bring my mood up to an approximation of what a “normal” person must feel like. I envision it like a line graph charting the mood of an individual. You can kind of  find a baseline “happiness” level after normalizing the variable highs and lows. My own baseline is significantly below the standard. My peaks don’t go as high as others’ and my lows are much lower. The meds are supposed to bring my baseline up closer to where the standard is. But it seems like sometimes depression can overwhelm the meds and plummet me back down to those depths. I was shocked at how quickly the death of a close family member dropped me down there. I shouldn’t have been surprised, I suppose. After all, we’re talking about the ending of a life of someone in my family. It’s supposed to be depressing. I guess I just didn’t realize how it would trip me over the edge of what I consider emotional depression into clinical depression. That’s how I think of it, anyway. I’m no neurologist.

At any rate, the most surprising thing was probably the anxiety. I’ve been lucky enough to get to deal with anxiety on a daily basis, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on it; what it felt like, how to deal with it, what kind of effects it would produce, etc. But this storm took me by surprise. By that Sunday I was on my way to a full-blown panic attack. And the sucky thing about it is that one little intellectual part of my brain kept functioning, analyzing my reactions, trying to understand and deal with it but unable to take control over the rest of my brain, which was running around screaming inside my skull. I had never before experienced that kind of deep pain and panic, not even in the past when I would have panic attacks almost regularly. They didn’t have the same almost stabbing sensation of exquisite fear crystallized in the center of my brain.

The human spirit has an amazing capability for recovery. We posses all sorts of mechanisms for getting through traumatic events. My own crisis didn’t last for more than a couple of days. Not to say that his death doesn’t affect me still. I only mean that the irrational fear subsided after a couple of days and I was able to process things more like a real person. The existential dread has gone and now what remains is the sadness of knowing that I will never see him again and the empathy for his family who now have to put the pieces back together and maintain that sense of family with such a large part of it taken away. Even after all this introspection I’m no closer to understanding how I would manage to get through something like this happening to one of my children.

And so, delight. My wife’s aunt, the mother of the deceased, raises dogs. She had a litter of 14 week old puppies just waiting for new homes. Seeing the delight of children in the presence of a puppy has to help to start healing the pain, in some small way. So we came home with a new family member, a four-legged fluffy cotton-ball called Happy. And her presence does help pierce the veil of depression and bring back some of the joy in life that seemingly gets ripped out when a family member dies. And every day a new sun rises, new experiences come our way and it would be a shame to miss them, even the painful ones. They are what remind us that we are alive.