"Where did she go?"

Posted: September 16, 2010 by Me in Labels: , ,
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I've been getting through season five of Buffy again. Every once in a while I go through and watch a few seasons at a time just to reconnect with the stories. After Joyce started getting sick I was girding myself for the one episode we, as fans, all praise and despair at. I finally got to it. "The Body". This is...devastating, as an episode.

It encapsulates strongly the confusion and disarray that you go through when someone you love dies. I can't take the reminders. But I will. Because in under a month, I will standing at a grave on the two-year anniversary of Ashleigh's death. So much about this episode really resonated with me about the whole experience, and for the first time, I was a mess for most of it. Before, I had thought it was sad. But nothing about it hit me personally. I didn't identify with all of the beats that the story hit or the moments within little actions. I certainly had no idea what it was like.

Above all, there's the deafening silence. Silence envelops you, swallows you whole, threatens to keep you. There's nothing wrong with the quiet; with wanting to stay in it. But you have to punch through it, to get to where there is sound again. You need laughter. You need to hear more than the sound of your tears escaping you. You need the sounds and comfort of people. Loud, dissonant sound from all angles. Annoying sounds. It helps, but not in the way you expect. It just pushes you forward into realization.

A realization that nothing feels correct. Everything is...an echo. A distorted vision. The world is 1 degree off, and you can't stand straight. You may as well be walking a tightrope instead of a sidewalk. The balance is wrong. You want to be okay. You also want to be a mess. There is a struggle to keep your face neutral.

As humans, we are solution-seeking. We have blame needs. We want to know why. There is anger. Hugs. Love. Death is beyond understanding. We all know we only have a certain amount of time. But it all happens so quickly. Time is strange, and terrible, and confusing. It eats at us, digesting our experiences sometimes more quickly than we can remember them properly.
"I mean, I knew her, and then she's-there's just a body, and I don't understand why she just can't get back in it and not be dead anymore. And I was having fruit punch, and I thought, 'Joyce will never have any more fruit punch, ever, and she'll never have eggs or yawn or brush her hair, not ever.' And no one will explain to me why."
When someone dies, we start second-guessing. We play the "What if?" game. And we lose. Some of the hardest things to deal with are the things we didn't do or should have done. Things that don't leave you for a long time. You try not to regret. You want to have said all there was worth saying to them. But you probably didn't. You forgot that there is no guarantee. You lied to yourself. They'll be there. Of course they'll be there. They're your age, and you're invincible.
There is such helplessness, to the thousandth degree. It doesn't matter if you could have done something or if it was completely beyond anyone's control to help. "There's things...thoughts and reactions I had that I couldn't understand or even try to explain to anyone else. Thoughts that made me feel like I was losing it or like I was some kind of horrible person." If you had just been there, it would be different. But it is different. They are gone and you are still here.
"It's not her. It's not her. She's gone."
"Where did she go?"