I only met her once, but we corresponded for 18 months since meeting on OKCupid. She died from complications of leukemia, which she'd fought for six years. She was fine one day, and then three days later, it was all over.
I went to her funeral today, a week after she died. Man, what a battery of feelings. First thing walking into the church, was the table full of photos, and a wooden box containing her ashes. I was creeped out by this almost more than by a body in a casket. It's the idea that a person, once living, breathing, feeling, has now been reduced to something put in a box too small even for a pair of shoes. It's the utter ablation of the person, the self.
And of course the service is full of talk about how the person is gone, but her spirit lives on, and people talk about how they saw a bird and they swear it was her, or they felt her presence next to them in the car, and I just want to scream at them "You goddamn fools, you're kidding yourselves. She's dead and we're not going to see her ever again." Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be callous. In fact, I think my response is far more emotional and caring. I think people are really kidding themselves with all this spirit lives on hokum, when I try to confront the fact that they've been lost forever. And so I TRULY mourn that fact, while the others cling to a false hope that her death was for a purpose, a plan, that they'll all be reunited together. All I see was a great, good person who had a terribly unfair fate to suffer for six long years, and then die young.
But it was also deeply disturbing because funerals remind me of just how socially addled I am as an aspie. This girl was 27, and had so many friends who came out to mourn her. If I were to die now, I doubt many would come to my funeral, and if they would, they would come because they're friends of my parents, not me. I do try, but I'm just not the person who is going to be loved or remembered like her.
And I feel guilty, really. She was a much better person than me. She had so much to give, and I wonder what I have to offer. Despite all my efforts to really matter, I fear I won't. Why does she get taken so soon, while I stay healthy? She deserved to live, not me.
I want there to be a God, because I want to meet him/her and ask for answers. Why do you make people suffer? What possible good does it serve? I will never understand it.
God I will miss her and our online chats.
10 Feb 2011, 10:28 pm
