Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.
It’s a fascinating and confronting thing when someone you love dies and the inevitable reflection on their life and your relationship reveals perhaps how little you may have known about them, of their life, their workings of their soul. Or when secrets or significant, but hidden aspects of their life and personality are revealed to you for the first time.
It’s perhaps an inevitability of death and life that we only ever know a portion of another’s life story while they are alive no matter how intimately familiar we are with them. Often we learn of facets of their lives only after the fact.
When we are young and those older than us die that is not surprising, in fact it’s expected that we learn much about the person at their funeral or wake. It can be one of the ‘joys’ of the rituals that surround death, that the life events and achievements are shared amongst the group, significant moments and anecdotes recounted, and the best and most human aspects of the person’s life are expressed and shared.
But what if you are denied these opportunities? What if the death of your loved one is complicated? What if you learn something about the person or their passing that doesn’t reflect ‘well’ on them, their life, your relationship or family following their passing? Or uncover something that you find hard to reconcile with your pre-existing conception of them? What if you discover a secret that you believe they would prefer remained so, had they the choice? What would you do???
What do you do with such revelations? With your complicated, disenfranchised grief? These are the questions that I still seek the answers too. This is a part of my, and therefore his unfinished story.