Into Light
Note: This post discusses death in with some degree of graphicness, along with the death of a child. It has not been proofread. My sincerest thanks for your patience and understanding.
So when I was four years old, my older brother’s best friend died in a car accident. Dylan* was only six years old when he passed, and the memory of my mother telling me of the tragedy is one of mystery to me--that is to say, I remember it happening, but how I felt is long forgotten. What I can recall is how everyone else reacted to it---my brother, who was Dylan’s age, losing his closest friend at an age where death is still hard to fathom. My mother and father, who had seen enough death in their own lives, now mourning the passing of the person who meant the world to their own child, having to look at the unthinkable tragedy of losing a child that young that closely.
All I remember--and it is not necessarily my grief to have, just one that I can recollect vaguely, in the same way that I recollect old fights on the school playground or birthday parties that I wasn’t invited to--is the general mien of sadness, along with the briefest whisper of the small boy who was not too big to include his friend’s little sisters in their play. There was a child one day, and then the next, there was a tomb. There was my brother, who had only just started writing sentences, giving a eulogy. There were my parents, helping him put words to a loss so magnificent that even the most detached would shudder at thought. And then there was Dylan’s guardian, who had been gravely injured in the same accident that killed him, to the point where she was unable to attend his own funeral. And that is where adult me and little me end. Little me could see the way through that kind of pain, or at least what I thought the pain was---there were always more Christmases and hugs and school recitals to look forward to. Dylan was gone, and my little world could continue to turn on its axis into infinitum.
For the longest time, I could sit and have the luxury of remembering Dylan without the pain of comprehending his loss, without knowing what it means to live a life as busy and as sweet as his and it drawing to a sudden close. I could sit and think about Ninja Turtles and long games of Crossfire and his family’s manicured back garden and pool and my water wings. I could survive the many times our mom gathered us into the car, for my brother’s sake, to go visit Dylan’s grave--a vast slot in an open-air crypt at the local Catholic cemetery. To see his name etched into the granite and think of his smile, and not of his tiny body, forever alone in a vast room of satin and rock.
Dylan’s loss affected my brother in ways I will never understand--not just because my brother and I aren’t particularly close, but because both of their lives were intertwined and cruelly severed in such a short frame of time. Where I heard Dylan’s laugh, my brother heard the same, and then had to deal with the pain of that next planned sleepover being wiped into oblivion. Of the friend who will never call you back.
You can imagine my shock, when, nine years later, the limousine ferrying my family from my dad’s funeral mass to his burial place pulled up not just to the same Catholic cemetery, but the very same crypt where Dylan was laid to rest. But there I was, sick off my own pain, the surrealness of having to revisit a site of so much direct and collateral trauma on what was the worst day of my life rendering me limp as a noodle. Between Dylan’s death and my father’s, I had already lost several members of my extended family, in ways both peaceful and genuinely horrifying; yet I couldn’t help but feel like All Saints was the place everybody went to die. The bucolic, gentle hills checked with the occasional massive oak tree, sprinkled in bouquets of plastic flowers, the tastefully contemporary, bland architecture of its various mausoleums and chapels---the sole inheritance bequeathed to my family in death.
For a long time after dad’s funeral, visiting there was an unsettling and unpleasant experience: the shuffle between his plot in a wall to Dylan’s, the violent weeping over the both of them, both too young to have died by any measure of fairness. My mom had started the tradition of getting dinner every year after visiting on Dad’s death anniversary, and soon enough, that turned to getting black out drunk after visiting, until it was just avoiding the cemetery entirely and just getting black out drunk every single night. Visiting the place was like picking off scabs, and leaving a more permanent, damaging mark as a consequence. It simply was not for me.
Back in 2016, I happened to play a video game---please bear with me for two paragraphs, I promise it’s relevant--entitled “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture”; it’s more or less what you’d call a walking simulator, and you play in first-person as a nameless, bodiless entity, exploring an abandoned fictional town in 1980-something Shropshire, England. Most of the game consists of walking around and collecting old phone calls, tape recordings, and other ephemera scattered about the picturesque village, in the name of piecing together the narrative of what happened before, during, and after the town’s seeming demise. The exciting pull, however, is your ability to hunt and watch several “etchings” of people who once occupied its cottages and pubs, in the form of vaguely human shafts of light that recreate various scenarios in the town. By the end of each chapter, the player has followed one main character’s etching to the moment of their passing, from whence the character bursts into a cosmic showering of light particles, holy and peaceful, slowly suspended in the air like dust.
The player eventually comes to learn that humanity made contact with an entity known as “the pattern”, and from there, the pattern’s attempts to communicate back from across the gulf of space inadvertently end up inadvertently ravaging the town. The British government slowly quarantines the hamlet, and then, horrifically, once they realize the pattern cannot be contained through quarantine alone, decide to carpet bomb it into oblivion. With enough time, the player assumes that the pattern successfully survives the desolation and succeeds in quickly subsuming the entire world. It is only towards the very end of the game that the pattern is revealed to a collective consciousness, a stream of light bouncing across the endless deep that shares the memory and love of everyone it consumes.
It’s a sobering but achingly beautiful ending, made all the more potent by the Ralph Vaughan Williams-esque chamber music that weaves in and out of the game. As the closing scenes fades into the darkness of the end credits, a sublime choir chants the words:
Now everything has come to rest
The end has come and I am not afraid
We travel on towards a new beginning
We slip away and we are unafraid.
The light we cast
Creates a bridge
And guides the way across the ages deep.
In spite of the fact that I experienced Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture several years ago, I think of it with growing frequency, as I lose more people in my life, as I grow older and fell my teeth ache and my back cramp, as I look down at my daughter and desperately, hopelessly wish for as much time with her as I can possibly get. What becomes of the space where a person once existed, both physically and spiritually? How do I make peace with the fact that I have no control over the answer?
Yesterday, I went to my father’s grave for the first time in nearly a decade, at the gentle encouragement of my husband. We drove down in the light rain, printed out photos, and picked out flowers to place before his own slot in the crypt. We blasted several Beatles albums worth of songs the whole journey, and yet still all I could pay attention to was my anxiety about seeing Dad again. Confronting all the raw pain, old and new, that has accumulated over the decades.
I sat in front of his name and thought about something I’d read once, as an idiot who never took high school physics and as a lazy agnostic who eres on the side of optimism--that death is at its most hopeful when we think of it in terms of the law of conservation of energy, which tells us that energy cannot be destroyed or created--that it can only change forms. That all of our body’s functions, its sinew, the carbon in its bones--they might decay and rot, but it will not ever disappear. That the very atoms that make us will be transformed into something else of purpose, no matter how impossibly small they are.
I thought of the impossibly tiny space that is my dad--and Dylan’s--final corporeal home. And while the image of their bodies does not bring me any comfort, to know that I am sitting in a space where they still exist and give purpose to the world brings me peace. To think of the two of them, let alone everyone else I have ever loved in my life, existing into infinitum, as millions of little remembrances dispersed into endlessness.
I think of the light, however small or large, everyone has ever cast onto me, and I close my eyes. I think of the goodness of Dylan and how he irrevocably changed my brother in his short but fantastic life, and feel it like a blanket on my shoulders. I hear the laughter of my father echoed back to me by countless pieces of him, suspended around me like dust, only just perceivable when the sun hits them a certain way.
I hope the wind carries the two of them everywhere beautiful and good in this world. I hope that everyone who ever loved them feels them in the ripple of the sea, in the hug of another friend, in the simple peace of a quiet night alone. I hope that somewhere, in the olamic nothingness that is existence, some fragment of me will meet them again and join them in their journey, embers glowing together in the palm of the universe.
So when I was four years old, my older brother’s best friend died in a car accident. Dylan* was only six years old when he passed, and the memory of my mother telling me of the tragedy is one of mystery to me--that is to say, I remember it happening, but how I felt is long forgotten. What I can recall is how everyone else reacted to it---my brother, who was Dylan’s age, losing his closest friend at an age where death is still hard to fathom. My mother and father, who had seen enough death in their own lives, now mourning the passing of the person who meant the world to their own child, having to look at the unthinkable tragedy of losing a child that young that closely.
All I remember--and it is not necessarily my grief to have, just one that I can recollect vaguely, in the same way that I recollect old fights on the school playground or birthday parties that I wasn’t invited to--is the general mien of sadness, along with the briefest whisper of the small boy who was not too big to include his friend’s little sisters in their play. There was a child one day, and then the next, there was a tomb. There was my brother, who had only just started writing sentences, giving a eulogy. There were my parents, helping him put words to a loss so magnificent that even the most detached would shudder at thought. And then there was Dylan’s guardian, who had been gravely injured in the same accident that killed him, to the point where she was unable to attend his own funeral. And that is where adult me and little me end. Little me could see the way through that kind of pain, or at least what I thought the pain was---there were always more Christmases and hugs and school recitals to look forward to. Dylan was gone, and my little world could continue to turn on its axis into infinitum.
For the longest time, I could sit and have the luxury of remembering Dylan without the pain of comprehending his loss, without knowing what it means to live a life as busy and as sweet as his and it drawing to a sudden close. I could sit and think about Ninja Turtles and long games of Crossfire and his family’s manicured back garden and pool and my water wings. I could survive the many times our mom gathered us into the car, for my brother’s sake, to go visit Dylan’s grave--a vast slot in an open-air crypt at the local Catholic cemetery. To see his name etched into the granite and think of his smile, and not of his tiny body, forever alone in a vast room of satin and rock.
Dylan’s loss affected my brother in ways I will never understand--not just because my brother and I aren’t particularly close, but because both of their lives were intertwined and cruelly severed in such a short frame of time. Where I heard Dylan’s laugh, my brother heard the same, and then had to deal with the pain of that next planned sleepover being wiped into oblivion. Of the friend who will never call you back.
You can imagine my shock, when, nine years later, the limousine ferrying my family from my dad’s funeral mass to his burial place pulled up not just to the same Catholic cemetery, but the very same crypt where Dylan was laid to rest. But there I was, sick off my own pain, the surrealness of having to revisit a site of so much direct and collateral trauma on what was the worst day of my life rendering me limp as a noodle. Between Dylan’s death and my father’s, I had already lost several members of my extended family, in ways both peaceful and genuinely horrifying; yet I couldn’t help but feel like All Saints was the place everybody went to die. The bucolic, gentle hills checked with the occasional massive oak tree, sprinkled in bouquets of plastic flowers, the tastefully contemporary, bland architecture of its various mausoleums and chapels---the sole inheritance bequeathed to my family in death.
For a long time after dad’s funeral, visiting there was an unsettling and unpleasant experience: the shuffle between his plot in a wall to Dylan’s, the violent weeping over the both of them, both too young to have died by any measure of fairness. My mom had started the tradition of getting dinner every year after visiting on Dad’s death anniversary, and soon enough, that turned to getting black out drunk after visiting, until it was just avoiding the cemetery entirely and just getting black out drunk every single night. Visiting the place was like picking off scabs, and leaving a more permanent, damaging mark as a consequence. It simply was not for me.
Back in 2016, I happened to play a video game---please bear with me for two paragraphs, I promise it’s relevant--entitled “Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture”; it’s more or less what you’d call a walking simulator, and you play in first-person as a nameless, bodiless entity, exploring an abandoned fictional town in 1980-something Shropshire, England. Most of the game consists of walking around and collecting old phone calls, tape recordings, and other ephemera scattered about the picturesque village, in the name of piecing together the narrative of what happened before, during, and after the town’s seeming demise. The exciting pull, however, is your ability to hunt and watch several “etchings” of people who once occupied its cottages and pubs, in the form of vaguely human shafts of light that recreate various scenarios in the town. By the end of each chapter, the player has followed one main character’s etching to the moment of their passing, from whence the character bursts into a cosmic showering of light particles, holy and peaceful, slowly suspended in the air like dust.
The player eventually comes to learn that humanity made contact with an entity known as “the pattern”, and from there, the pattern’s attempts to communicate back from across the gulf of space inadvertently end up inadvertently ravaging the town. The British government slowly quarantines the hamlet, and then, horrifically, once they realize the pattern cannot be contained through quarantine alone, decide to carpet bomb it into oblivion. With enough time, the player assumes that the pattern successfully survives the desolation and succeeds in quickly subsuming the entire world. It is only towards the very end of the game that the pattern is revealed to a collective consciousness, a stream of light bouncing across the endless deep that shares the memory and love of everyone it consumes.
It’s a sobering but achingly beautiful ending, made all the more potent by the Ralph Vaughan Williams-esque chamber music that weaves in and out of the game. As the closing scenes fades into the darkness of the end credits, a sublime choir chants the words:
Now everything has come to rest
The end has come and I am not afraid
We travel on towards a new beginning
We slip away and we are unafraid.
The light we cast
Creates a bridge
And guides the way across the ages deep.
In spite of the fact that I experienced Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture several years ago, I think of it with growing frequency, as I lose more people in my life, as I grow older and fell my teeth ache and my back cramp, as I look down at my daughter and desperately, hopelessly wish for as much time with her as I can possibly get. What becomes of the space where a person once existed, both physically and spiritually? How do I make peace with the fact that I have no control over the answer?
Yesterday, I went to my father’s grave for the first time in nearly a decade, at the gentle encouragement of my husband. We drove down in the light rain, printed out photos, and picked out flowers to place before his own slot in the crypt. We blasted several Beatles albums worth of songs the whole journey, and yet still all I could pay attention to was my anxiety about seeing Dad again. Confronting all the raw pain, old and new, that has accumulated over the decades.
I sat in front of his name and thought about something I’d read once, as an idiot who never took high school physics and as a lazy agnostic who eres on the side of optimism--that death is at its most hopeful when we think of it in terms of the law of conservation of energy, which tells us that energy cannot be destroyed or created--that it can only change forms. That all of our body’s functions, its sinew, the carbon in its bones--they might decay and rot, but it will not ever disappear. That the very atoms that make us will be transformed into something else of purpose, no matter how impossibly small they are.
I thought of the impossibly tiny space that is my dad--and Dylan’s--final corporeal home. And while the image of their bodies does not bring me any comfort, to know that I am sitting in a space where they still exist and give purpose to the world brings me peace. To think of the two of them, let alone everyone else I have ever loved in my life, existing into infinitum, as millions of little remembrances dispersed into endlessness.
I think of the light, however small or large, everyone has ever cast onto me, and I close my eyes. I think of the goodness of Dylan and how he irrevocably changed my brother in his short but fantastic life, and feel it like a blanket on my shoulders. I hear the laughter of my father echoed back to me by countless pieces of him, suspended around me like dust, only just perceivable when the sun hits them a certain way.
I hope the wind carries the two of them everywhere beautiful and good in this world. I hope that everyone who ever loved them feels them in the ripple of the sea, in the hug of another friend, in the simple peace of a quiet night alone. I hope that somewhere, in the olamic nothingness that is existence, some fragment of me will meet them again and join them in their journey, embers glowing together in the palm of the universe.
*Name has been changed for privacy.
This is a beautiful piece of writing. Thank you.