The Shape of Emptiness

Or, what happens to us when we die

I’ve lost three friends this year. Three friends. Important people. People who were important in different ways. I wasn’t able to tell two of them they were important. And now it’s too late.

That’s the thing about death.

How do we go forward and comfort ourselves when we lose people? When we can’t say the things we should have said? What happened to them? Where did they go?

We all ask ourselves these questions throughout our lives. I remember when my dad died when I was 24, trying to be brave and feeling utterly lost. I remember being on a night out with friends a few months later and suddenly feeling overwhelmed by this question of ‘where did he go? Where is he?’

By the time my stepdad died when I was 33, I knew how to survive a death, my medicine was keeping things close, going back to basics: eat well, sleep well, exercise. No big groups until you feel safe again to be out in the world. It’s the advice I give others now, even when they haven’t asked for it.

What happens when we die? I asked my friend Vic yesterday. Vic is my builder and my friend who died last week introduced him to me five years ago. Vic turned seventy while he built my extension. He’s seventy five now. We’ve talked a lot in the years of our friendship, mostly about steel beams and building regs and cement (always so much cement), windows and doors and bricks and type one mot hardcore, plumbing, electrics, his kids, my kid, his grandchildren, his wife’s knee operation, my ex. Seamlessly our conversation changed after building work was complete, we became friends thanks to our friend who died last week.

When I told him on Sunday night that our friend had died, he said he would drive to see me. And outside my front door we embraced yesterday lunchtime, there were no words that would adequately express our shock and grief and guilt (our friend ended his own life). But inside, as we sat on my sofa in the kitchen having eaten fried egg sandwiches in honour of our friend, I asked him: what happens when we die, Vic?

He wouldn’t tell me at first. He said I would think he was weird. But I pressed him. I needed to know. I looked at him as if he had all the answers. I was willing to accept whatever he told me in that moment just to make sense of something so senseless that had happened.

And so he told me. He told me that time does not exist, not really. Not up in space, he said, only here on earth. When you go to sleep, you don’t feel like you’ve slept for eight hours, do you? If someone killed you and woke you up after a week, you wouldn’t know it had been a week, would you? I shook my head. So time doesn’t exist, he said, and so we never die, we’re just reborn again and again and again.

Ok, I said. I pointed at my black cat Derek and said so… and he said, I know what you’re going to ask me and I haven’t figured it all out. Ok, I said.

We had laughed that afternoon about all the funny times we’d had with our friend. And we did, so many laughs. We talked about how guilty we felt, guilty that we couldn’t have made a difference. I reassured him we couldn’t. But I was reassuring myself. I still am.

After two hours he got up to leave, it would take him an hour to get home. Is our friend ok now? I asked him.

Well, he died before and it didn’t do him any harm, Vic said, based on his theory that we’re just reborn and reborn.

And I was willing to accept that. It would be explanation enough. Something to make sense of something so senseless. Something to hold onto.

We don’t always have to have the right answers, and we don’t always have to have words. Sometimes there aren’t any words, even for those of us who make a living from them. Or at least use them to make more sense of the world.

I must write here that the friend we lost was the kindest man I have ever known, and will ever know. I know that. If you know one thing about him, it must be that. Not that it matters now.

I borrowed the title of this post from a non-fiction flash essay by Brenda Miller. I’m posting it below because it speaks to me and how I’m feeling. But also, I love this idea in her essay, of a group of students giving shape and texture and physical sensation to their words. Perhaps you might like to think of some words you have written, and ask yourself, if you could make them physical, how might you do it? How might we feel your words with our hands?

Or maybe we would just acknowledge the space around them.

Sometimes there are no words.

Have a read:

https://brevitymag.com/nonfiction/the-shape-of-emptiness/