On Love and Grief
some things happen with purpose. If atoned to the Tao, then for sure they do. I am mostly not atoned at all, but still sometimes, things happen for a purpose, and sometimes I become aware of the invisible hand.
If you would have asked me two weeks ago, where I would be now, I would have answered, and as a matter of fact I did answer to a few people, that I would be in Thailand, kite surfing on Pran Buri beach. And I would have explained that this is my first CNY holiday without my family, because I need time for myself, because I need to detach for a while from the rat race at work and from my offspring’s yoke. I would have answered that I need some privacy to find myself again.
I am not in Thailand, but in Austria; in the town where I was born and where I spent the first 18 years of my life. The decision to come here was taken only five days before I got on the plane. I felt it’s not the time to play, but to move on with some serious stuff for which I need to sacrifice my vacation.
My father’s house was without a tenant since April last year and it was in a dilapidating condition. I thought that I needed to get the renovation on track and rent it out again. And I had confirmed with my therapist that I am not ready to sell yet. For one reason, because a home in Austria is a nice backup if things go wrong in China; for another, because the house is the only thing that is left from my originating family. They have all gone. One by one.
My father died on Christmas Day more than 4 years ago. It was a sudden and at least for me, unexpected death. But I had felt the 72 hours before his death an indescribable anxiety, which I was not able to connect to his death. I just thought I was about to go nuts.
We had just arrived at his place on December 23th evening after an in-between-jobs vacation in New Zealand, and were supposed to spend another 3 months with him. I therefore made the mistake to not pay greatest attention to these last few hours that I had with him; it took me months to get over this personal failure, because the only interaction with my father, which I remember consciously was when we hugged heartedly upon our arrival. The remaining hours are blurred by anxiety.
Christmas is celebrated in Austria on the evening of December 24th with a family dinner after which one adult usually rings a bell, indicating that the Christkind has come and left presents below the Christmas tree. The children may then see the Christmas tree, which is usually hidden away in a separate room, for the first time, and after some carols are sung and candles lit, they are allowed to unwrap their gifts.
My father had prepared everything, but I cannot recall any details of that evening. We suffered from jet lag and therefore went to bed early, so even the Christmas evening was short and we did not fully savor the dinner he had prepared for us, and could not appreciate the Christmas tree he had decorated in particular for his grand daughter. I even declined to have a bottle of wine with him, because I was so dead tired from that anxiety which had driven me to do all sorts of useless things.
Zoe woke up around 2 am. Considering a 7 hour time difference between Austria and China, we figured this was normal. But Zoe said that she wanted to see her grand dad. I told her to go back to sleep, because grand dad would also be sleeping. But a few hours later she wanted to see him again. I thought this was indeed strange, so I went upstairs with her and sneaked into my fathers bedroom, the way I had done 100 times before. I still heard some sound and thought that was him snoring.
When I turned on his reading lamp, I saw that there was some blood saliva mixture on his pillow. His skin had faded into a pale white and when I touched his hands I realized that his body warmth had almost entirely gone. By then the certainty of his death had already thrown me into a black hole.
It turned out that the snoring sound was the last oxygen evaporating from his lungs. The emergency physicians who came 30 minutes later told me so. My father had died of a brain stroke. Most likely around 2 am, when Zoe asked us the first time to see him. He most likely did not feel any pain, but died in his sleep.
I on the contrary went insane. Realizing his death, the air in his bedroom suddenly seemed to have gone, and all the anxiety that I had felt the days prior to his death suddenly made sense. But the intellectual understanding was paired with so much pain. 34 years of bond had been taken from me. My biggest ally, my best friend, my worst foe, my old man was suddenly gone.
About two hours later, after his death had been officially registered by some government physician, I carried with one of the red cross volunteers his already stiff body on a stretcher downstairs. Where he was loaded into a van and taken to the morgue. I was left back alone without knowing what to do next.
But I was left with pain and guilt. Why didn’t I come home earlier? Why didn’t I connect my anxiety with his death? Why didn’t I realize what was going to happen? He didn’t walk downstairs to welcome us. He told me in the morning of 24th that his feet felt heavy, so we cut short our walking route. The more days passed, the more indications of his immanent death did I discover. The weight he had lost since his partner’s death; his resignation to find a new partner; he had even stopped to take his medication I was told later by his general practitioner. Zoe’s premonition had confirmed in yet another instance that we are all connected; she did feel that there was something wrong and was able to pinpoint it. Why didn’t I?
The longer I thought about the last years of his life, the more guilt I felt on my chest. I had left him alone with the burden of taking care of his partner, who suffered cancer from 2005 onwards and eventually died thereof in July 2007. But in particular I did not show any empathy in regard to his loneliness, which he must have experienced afterwards. He sometimes did tell me on the phone, but I did not respond properly. How should I? Having just started a new job in China.
During the last 4 years, I had occasional business trips to Austria and I stayed in my father’s house a few times alone. But I don’t like to stay there alone. The place still gives me the creeps. I was 5 months old, when my mother left me in the living room to hang herself in the attic. I was 33, when I found my father in his bedroom having died of a brain stroke. But what makes me even more uncomfortable is the loneliness that I experience there. It feels like something forces me to experience the same loneliness that my father must have experienced during his last three years. It is an excruciating loneliness. It drains me of all my energy. It makes me want to bring an end to my life. So I can’t help but move into a hotel.
That’s where I am now; in a hotel some 800 meter from my father’s place. Daytime I wait for construction companies to call me. I then take them to the building, show them around and discuss the project. In between those appointments I repair things. In the evenings, I return to the hotel and try to make sense out what is happening, of what I feel. Above all I tell myself, how insane it was to cancel my kite surfing vacation for two weeks toiling and suffering.
It is a paradox though that I now cling to that building after all that did happen there, after all those years that I tried to get as far away as possible. Why am I so attached to that house? Isn’t it high time to sell it altogether?
It was yesterday that I went to my father’s grave, as I always do, when I am in town. I realized that seeing my father had turned into a routine, a sort of religious routine, quite similar to all these empty routines believers and non-believers all the same are subjected to in their churches, mosques and synagogues.
The difference between the former and the latter is the degree of abstraction. While religious collective routines are mostly incomprehensible for the observant, to such an extent that he is - even if explained by a clergyman – ignorant to the connection between his act and the meaning, my individual routine is quite concrete: I go to the grave to see my father, and tell myself that by doing that, I pay respect. What a Confucian ancestry cult that I and so many others perform in the West …
I suspect though that my routine has an additional psychological motivation: guilt. Sure there is love too, but guilt did supersede love until recently. I am done with it. Enough guilt. Yesterday, I cried not because of guilt, which is after all a selfish feeling. No, I cried because I love my father and because I miss him a lot.
I decided therefore, that I will not extend the lease contract for the grave plot. It will expire 2016 and I will then scatter my father’s, mother’s and grandmother’s ashes in the Danube.
Scatter the ashes of the dead in the sea or some other water. Let them go. Graveyards serve only the transitory purpose of putting the beloved one from the world of the living into the world of the dead. Standing in front of our gravestone, which is neatly encircled by low cut bushes, I asked myself, why we think that the dead also need a plot. They don’t. They are gone. They have left the world of the physical. The have moved on to the world of the spiritual.
But for many people, including myself, the path to the grave is a well-trodden path. A well-established routine. An individual religious routine of ancestry worship. Something within me does not want to give up this routine. It is a part of me, almost as long as my father was a part of my life. I remember accompanying my father to see my mother many times for many years. I remember visiting my father telling me that he himself would join her soon. He did say that already many years prior to his own death, with a suffering voice of someone who has had enough of life. And life was tough on him, indeed.
Then another thought occurred to me, which struck me as significant: My father’s house feels itself like a tomb. If I can let go of the grave, I will also have to let go of the house, unless my family has an urgent requirement to live there. But lets be honest: I don’t want to live here anymore unless WWIII expels me from China. I have moved on years ago. I am detached from Austria and I don’t see attachment coming. How did Soren Kierkegard say: Live can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. I don’t see yet where forwards will be, but it won’t be backward Austria.
Lost in all these complex thoughts throughout the morning, it comes as no surprise – at least in retrospect – that I turn on the telly late at night and happen to watch a Japanese movie with the English title “Departures”. The German title is much more accurate and poetic though, bringing both music as a metaphor for life and as a most fitting association to the protagonist’s profession as cello player. “Die Kunst des Ausklangs”, literally translated into English probably something like “the art of dying away” lets me think of life as a chord that has been strung and swings all along until it fades away. The German title also reminds me of Eugen Herrigel’s great book “Zen in the Art of Archery”, in which he does not only explain his experience of the Zen in archery, but also his wife’s in the art of flower arrangement. “The art of fading away” seems to be related to the art of flower arrangement.
The movie consists of a series of funerals and Daigo, the cello player, learns his new profession of preparing corpses for their last journey from his experienced master, turning himself into a master of the trade, until he is confronted with his father’s death. It is only in this situation, that Daigo has to overcome wrath against his father for abandoning him at a young age. He does so, after two undertakers without skill or piety, defile his father’s body – at least in the perception of Daigo’s work ethic. By performing the ritual cleansing, by preparing his father’s corpse, by laying hands upon him, Daigo reconnects and encounters love, which eventually allows grief.
There is no grief without love. In order to feel grief, we have to admit and unearth love, which is often covered with layers of selfish emotions, like guilt in my case. On leaving the cemetery yesterday morning, I read this inscription on a passing gravestone: Death is life’s border stone, not love’s. (Der Tod ist der Grenzstein des Lebens aber nicht der Liebe.)
It might well be that I am bonded to my father’s house, it occurs to me, because it is a metaphor for my father’s corpse. It seems that I have projected my feelings for him into the building. Bringing the house into good order, has turned into a duty of paying him respect – not because of guilt, but because of love. The thought of changing the house into a nicely renovated building, with a modern light grey façade, an anthracite aluminum roof and clearly divided living areas fills me with joy. The act of repairing things itself, a broken spade there, a mirror to be fixed to a wall reminds me of Daigo arranging his departed clients with carefulness and devotion. I was never good at repairing stuff, because I lacked patience. Strangely I now bring up the patience for my father’s estate, I think, because I do it to honor him.
Having completed the renovation, I can hopefully send my father off over Hades and I expect that the invisible hand will show me then where our next stop will take us to.
If you would have asked me two weeks ago, where I would be now, I would have answered, and as a matter of fact I did answer to a few people, that I would be in Thailand, kite surfing on Pran Buri beach. And I would have explained that this is my first CNY holiday without my family, because I need time for myself, because I need to detach for a while from the rat race at work and from my offspring’s yoke. I would have answered that I need some privacy to find myself again.
I am not in Thailand, but in Austria; in the town where I was born and where I spent the first 18 years of my life. The decision to come here was taken only five days before I got on the plane. I felt it’s not the time to play, but to move on with some serious stuff for which I need to sacrifice my vacation.
My father’s house was without a tenant since April last year and it was in a dilapidating condition. I thought that I needed to get the renovation on track and rent it out again. And I had confirmed with my therapist that I am not ready to sell yet. For one reason, because a home in Austria is a nice backup if things go wrong in China; for another, because the house is the only thing that is left from my originating family. They have all gone. One by one.
My father died on Christmas Day more than 4 years ago. It was a sudden and at least for me, unexpected death. But I had felt the 72 hours before his death an indescribable anxiety, which I was not able to connect to his death. I just thought I was about to go nuts.
We had just arrived at his place on December 23th evening after an in-between-jobs vacation in New Zealand, and were supposed to spend another 3 months with him. I therefore made the mistake to not pay greatest attention to these last few hours that I had with him; it took me months to get over this personal failure, because the only interaction with my father, which I remember consciously was when we hugged heartedly upon our arrival. The remaining hours are blurred by anxiety.
Christmas is celebrated in Austria on the evening of December 24th with a family dinner after which one adult usually rings a bell, indicating that the Christkind has come and left presents below the Christmas tree. The children may then see the Christmas tree, which is usually hidden away in a separate room, for the first time, and after some carols are sung and candles lit, they are allowed to unwrap their gifts.
My father had prepared everything, but I cannot recall any details of that evening. We suffered from jet lag and therefore went to bed early, so even the Christmas evening was short and we did not fully savor the dinner he had prepared for us, and could not appreciate the Christmas tree he had decorated in particular for his grand daughter. I even declined to have a bottle of wine with him, because I was so dead tired from that anxiety which had driven me to do all sorts of useless things.
Zoe woke up around 2 am. Considering a 7 hour time difference between Austria and China, we figured this was normal. But Zoe said that she wanted to see her grand dad. I told her to go back to sleep, because grand dad would also be sleeping. But a few hours later she wanted to see him again. I thought this was indeed strange, so I went upstairs with her and sneaked into my fathers bedroom, the way I had done 100 times before. I still heard some sound and thought that was him snoring.
When I turned on his reading lamp, I saw that there was some blood saliva mixture on his pillow. His skin had faded into a pale white and when I touched his hands I realized that his body warmth had almost entirely gone. By then the certainty of his death had already thrown me into a black hole.
It turned out that the snoring sound was the last oxygen evaporating from his lungs. The emergency physicians who came 30 minutes later told me so. My father had died of a brain stroke. Most likely around 2 am, when Zoe asked us the first time to see him. He most likely did not feel any pain, but died in his sleep.
I on the contrary went insane. Realizing his death, the air in his bedroom suddenly seemed to have gone, and all the anxiety that I had felt the days prior to his death suddenly made sense. But the intellectual understanding was paired with so much pain. 34 years of bond had been taken from me. My biggest ally, my best friend, my worst foe, my old man was suddenly gone.
About two hours later, after his death had been officially registered by some government physician, I carried with one of the red cross volunteers his already stiff body on a stretcher downstairs. Where he was loaded into a van and taken to the morgue. I was left back alone without knowing what to do next.
But I was left with pain and guilt. Why didn’t I come home earlier? Why didn’t I connect my anxiety with his death? Why didn’t I realize what was going to happen? He didn’t walk downstairs to welcome us. He told me in the morning of 24th that his feet felt heavy, so we cut short our walking route. The more days passed, the more indications of his immanent death did I discover. The weight he had lost since his partner’s death; his resignation to find a new partner; he had even stopped to take his medication I was told later by his general practitioner. Zoe’s premonition had confirmed in yet another instance that we are all connected; she did feel that there was something wrong and was able to pinpoint it. Why didn’t I?
The longer I thought about the last years of his life, the more guilt I felt on my chest. I had left him alone with the burden of taking care of his partner, who suffered cancer from 2005 onwards and eventually died thereof in July 2007. But in particular I did not show any empathy in regard to his loneliness, which he must have experienced afterwards. He sometimes did tell me on the phone, but I did not respond properly. How should I? Having just started a new job in China.
During the last 4 years, I had occasional business trips to Austria and I stayed in my father’s house a few times alone. But I don’t like to stay there alone. The place still gives me the creeps. I was 5 months old, when my mother left me in the living room to hang herself in the attic. I was 33, when I found my father in his bedroom having died of a brain stroke. But what makes me even more uncomfortable is the loneliness that I experience there. It feels like something forces me to experience the same loneliness that my father must have experienced during his last three years. It is an excruciating loneliness. It drains me of all my energy. It makes me want to bring an end to my life. So I can’t help but move into a hotel.
That’s where I am now; in a hotel some 800 meter from my father’s place. Daytime I wait for construction companies to call me. I then take them to the building, show them around and discuss the project. In between those appointments I repair things. In the evenings, I return to the hotel and try to make sense out what is happening, of what I feel. Above all I tell myself, how insane it was to cancel my kite surfing vacation for two weeks toiling and suffering.
It is a paradox though that I now cling to that building after all that did happen there, after all those years that I tried to get as far away as possible. Why am I so attached to that house? Isn’t it high time to sell it altogether?
It was yesterday that I went to my father’s grave, as I always do, when I am in town. I realized that seeing my father had turned into a routine, a sort of religious routine, quite similar to all these empty routines believers and non-believers all the same are subjected to in their churches, mosques and synagogues.
The difference between the former and the latter is the degree of abstraction. While religious collective routines are mostly incomprehensible for the observant, to such an extent that he is - even if explained by a clergyman – ignorant to the connection between his act and the meaning, my individual routine is quite concrete: I go to the grave to see my father, and tell myself that by doing that, I pay respect. What a Confucian ancestry cult that I and so many others perform in the West …
I suspect though that my routine has an additional psychological motivation: guilt. Sure there is love too, but guilt did supersede love until recently. I am done with it. Enough guilt. Yesterday, I cried not because of guilt, which is after all a selfish feeling. No, I cried because I love my father and because I miss him a lot.
I decided therefore, that I will not extend the lease contract for the grave plot. It will expire 2016 and I will then scatter my father’s, mother’s and grandmother’s ashes in the Danube.
Scatter the ashes of the dead in the sea or some other water. Let them go. Graveyards serve only the transitory purpose of putting the beloved one from the world of the living into the world of the dead. Standing in front of our gravestone, which is neatly encircled by low cut bushes, I asked myself, why we think that the dead also need a plot. They don’t. They are gone. They have left the world of the physical. The have moved on to the world of the spiritual.
But for many people, including myself, the path to the grave is a well-trodden path. A well-established routine. An individual religious routine of ancestry worship. Something within me does not want to give up this routine. It is a part of me, almost as long as my father was a part of my life. I remember accompanying my father to see my mother many times for many years. I remember visiting my father telling me that he himself would join her soon. He did say that already many years prior to his own death, with a suffering voice of someone who has had enough of life. And life was tough on him, indeed.
Then another thought occurred to me, which struck me as significant: My father’s house feels itself like a tomb. If I can let go of the grave, I will also have to let go of the house, unless my family has an urgent requirement to live there. But lets be honest: I don’t want to live here anymore unless WWIII expels me from China. I have moved on years ago. I am detached from Austria and I don’t see attachment coming. How did Soren Kierkegard say: Live can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards. I don’t see yet where forwards will be, but it won’t be backward Austria.
Lost in all these complex thoughts throughout the morning, it comes as no surprise – at least in retrospect – that I turn on the telly late at night and happen to watch a Japanese movie with the English title “Departures”. The German title is much more accurate and poetic though, bringing both music as a metaphor for life and as a most fitting association to the protagonist’s profession as cello player. “Die Kunst des Ausklangs”, literally translated into English probably something like “the art of dying away” lets me think of life as a chord that has been strung and swings all along until it fades away. The German title also reminds me of Eugen Herrigel’s great book “Zen in the Art of Archery”, in which he does not only explain his experience of the Zen in archery, but also his wife’s in the art of flower arrangement. “The art of fading away” seems to be related to the art of flower arrangement.
The movie consists of a series of funerals and Daigo, the cello player, learns his new profession of preparing corpses for their last journey from his experienced master, turning himself into a master of the trade, until he is confronted with his father’s death. It is only in this situation, that Daigo has to overcome wrath against his father for abandoning him at a young age. He does so, after two undertakers without skill or piety, defile his father’s body – at least in the perception of Daigo’s work ethic. By performing the ritual cleansing, by preparing his father’s corpse, by laying hands upon him, Daigo reconnects and encounters love, which eventually allows grief.
There is no grief without love. In order to feel grief, we have to admit and unearth love, which is often covered with layers of selfish emotions, like guilt in my case. On leaving the cemetery yesterday morning, I read this inscription on a passing gravestone: Death is life’s border stone, not love’s. (Der Tod ist der Grenzstein des Lebens aber nicht der Liebe.)
It might well be that I am bonded to my father’s house, it occurs to me, because it is a metaphor for my father’s corpse. It seems that I have projected my feelings for him into the building. Bringing the house into good order, has turned into a duty of paying him respect – not because of guilt, but because of love. The thought of changing the house into a nicely renovated building, with a modern light grey façade, an anthracite aluminum roof and clearly divided living areas fills me with joy. The act of repairing things itself, a broken spade there, a mirror to be fixed to a wall reminds me of Daigo arranging his departed clients with carefulness and devotion. I was never good at repairing stuff, because I lacked patience. Strangely I now bring up the patience for my father’s estate, I think, because I do it to honor him.
Having completed the renovation, I can hopefully send my father off over Hades and I expect that the invisible hand will show me then where our next stop will take us to.