The Seven stages of Loss

(TW: grief,death,loss,mental struggles,true story)

They stand and stare at her, she-sealed behind the glass with a face white as paper and lips purple blue, lying in an oak coffin, cold and frozen. Death leaned over like a bridge and kissed her forehead, tearing the warmth from the chest, and the air left the lungs and flew into the sky, and wings sprouted, ripping free from her back.

A beautiful young woman, rage stormed within her heart toward this cruel and empty world, and she screamed in desperate attempts to escape, wondering across the earth, searching for a way out but now at last she had left her physical body and prepared to lie beneath the soil in eternal rest.

And her face became fog, another number behind the cemetery gates, not a person but a piece of rotting flesh waiting for its final sentence.

A pile of people gathered on the other side of the glass staring at the body.

Their expressions showed pity, but behind the mask hid boredom.

They knew nothing about the poor,deceased woman.

And they were not familiar how much she liked lilac and none of them even remembered the colour of her eyes behind the closed eyelids.

Their tries to gather memories together of her existence just to have something to talk about, were pathetic when they could barely remember her name.

Among them was the family.

A short,pale,middle-aged woman with dark hair, graying roots and a face covered in wrinkles stood trembling on a bench and sobbed loudly. Nothing could bring comfort in that moment,the life she had given,had just been taken away.

Guilt gnawed at her for leaving her daughter, the one supposed to be protected , who was left to face life alone, now with no apology possible from the sobbing mother.

And she screamed and collapsed in complete ruins, one shell of a person.

Sadly, you never know what you have until you lose it.

Everyone crowded around trying to lift her from the ground and next to them stood her son: barely sixteen years old,already having seen too much.

He was lost in thought, while the others were looking at him as though it was his duty to repair what had been already broken.

They approached and told the young boy to help her, to lift and save and heal the pain while the responsibility teared up his whole being.

Still shocked from what had happened, unable to recover, his life was miserable and the future,unclear.

And at home his sick father waited for him on the deathbed.

A hole for his sister was already being prepared, the soil hard as stone.

Far from them sat the commanding presence of another woman, tall and made up only of skin and bones.

Her heart was cold and she, the dead woman’s aunt, did not possess a drop of emotion.

This felt like a task to be completed, just another thing to deal with as judgement pierced through her grieving sister.

Emotion was a weakness.

Her sons turned their eyes to the coffin, boredom was written across the faces, and they told stories, cracked jokes and tried to distract.

It was an inappropriate response to an absurd situation.

The father and the woman’s uncle glared around through furrowed brows with his crossed arms, ready to argue.

Scowling, he criticised things as insignificant as etiquette with military harshness, un-phased by the devastation of the day.

He acted like he cared when in reality had never really granted a thought about the dead girl,everything being just a mere performance of moral duty.

The man towered above the others like a tree with an arrogant,gloating stance and stern face,upon which rested his narrow glasses.

The deceased girl’s friends circled around her brother in desperate attempts to help and to say a kind word but what more could be said in a situation like this.

And amidst all the chaos,on a bench sat the old witch with a spiteful smile.

After carefully waiting for the right moment to come , she started muttering how her own granddaughter owed money that would never be payed back.

Lying upon the warm bed was the cold body,thought to be forever trapped in debt, no longer being able to feel the malice radiating from her glare.

The same woman who raised the girl,was now spitting venom like a snake about to ravish their prey.

Then the corpse was finally taken away and stuffed like useless garbage into the narrow hearse and slowly everyone followed behind it like a river on the road toward the church.

There they all mourned once again,while the priest walked around with his incense in hand.

Beside the coffin, the family was standing in line and waited and watched and prayed for Jesus to accept her beneath his wing.

But where was he when all of this happened?

The life is cruel, but God is always crueler.

His face can only hang above her lifeless human flesh in the form of an icon, staring down as everything freezes and is stripped of divine power.

The young boy wants to scream, to tear apart his clothes and skin like an ugly wallpaper,ripping them from his back and to gnaw the bones bare and lie beside his sister, covered beneath the white blanket.

They clutch candles and wax drips down their fingers, warming and burning the room.

Holy water is poured over her body,

while the next unflinching and unresponsive targets of barely concealed mourning all lay in line outside, waiting for their turn to be honoured and then soon forgotten.

And afterward, all of the gathered people step outside and turn gazes to the ground.

The blazing sun scorches their eyes while the coffin is slowly lowered into the deep hole in the earth and covered with heaps of soil.

Everyone looks around wondering if this is the end.

They will go home, and continue their lives while hers has already come to an end and misery remains here to feed on her closest souls.

The hedonism of food and alcohol serves to distract, the so-called celebration of life feeling more like the denial of death.

And that night the boy wakes up alone, laying down at the familiar tram stop and looks around as his vision blurs, unable to accept the grief and fear as it slowly settles into his mind.

So this is life?

A litany of temporary repairments until the damage becomes so irreversible that it finally ends you.

And he hears her voice before falling asleep and sees her face.

She is the most beautiful star tonight,

shining brightly in the sky while still raging like an eternal flame: untamed and strong.