Death Is Not An Absolution
I do not believe that death is an absolution. Death does not erase the person one was or change the impact of the choices one made. Death does not obliterate the truth of one’s life.
When someone dies, many have a tendency to absolve that person of who they actually were in life. I do not have this tendency. To me, who one was in life is the measure of that person, not the fact that they have died and no longer belong to the physical realm.
When my paternal grandmother died — a woman who was cold, prejudiced and more than likely, injured— I felt such discomfort as friends of her’s spoke of how kind, loving and giving she had been. That had not been my experience of her and the fact that she’d now died did not erase the pain and anger that she had caused me and others in my family.
As my paternal grandmother’s friends praised her, some turned to ask who I was. When I said I was M’s granddaughter, they were aghast and said, “What? We didn’t know M had a granddaughter.” I was 15 years old at the time. It was then my turn to be aghast. I marveled that this woman, who barely expressed warmth or love to me in life, had managed to hurt and insult me beyond the grave as well.
As I live my life, I aim to be genuine, kind, empathic, open-minded and socially conscious. Although I make plenty of mistakes, and I have both said and done things I am not proud of, I am not unkind, callous, selfish, close-minded or self-interested.
I do not believe that some human beings are more worthy than others. I know that there are untold stories within every person I meet, and I attempt to allow others to feel that they can unburden themselves with me, and perhaps let me sit with them in their pain.
Perhaps if someone had listened to my paternal grandmother’s burdens and had sat with her in her pain, she would not have caused the damage that she did. I did not love my grandmother — not when she was alive nor after she’d died — because she did not make me feel loved. It was how she related to me when she was alive that left me with the imprint of who she was.
Just because a person has died does not mean they can escape who they were in life. Our actions while we are living are the measure of our lives and the measure of who we will always be.
Death is not an absolution.
