We’ve heard about survivor’s guilt, you know, when someone survives an accident in which others were killed. That nagging, perhaps lifelong feeling of guilt of “why me?” Why did I live and all the others died? Yes, I should just be happy to be alive and count my blessings, there’s no reason to be racked with guilt for being so lucky. Except that life doesn’t work that way with our psyche. It can be a bothersome phenomenon, psychologically, mentally, and spiritually.
It took me some time to realize on some level that I was feeling the effects of survivor’s guilt, in a sense. Let me explain how this feeling has come about. It has a lot to do with my work life, my thirty-three years in the airline industry. You see, I worked with basically the same group of people all of those years. From age 25 on, the same people, perhaps a hundred or so co-workers, often in close quarters, day in and day out. We were just kids starting out in life, then young adults, then middle-aged and finally older adults hitting retirement age. I knew these people well. We grew up together, married, had families. All the life events that occur over the years. I think that is quite unusual in this world, to experience all this with the same group, like a large family.
Most people I know, outside of my work group, don’t stay in a job or single career or stay in a single company for their entire work life. Most people do not have the same co-workers at retirement age (60’s or so) that they had in their twenties. A very unique situation and work life.
So, in a sense, it was a very close-knit family of co-workers for several decades. Like I said, this is very unusual these days for most people. We really knew each other, we lived through so many life events together. And then, one by one, we started thinning our group through death. It seemed to be a continuous decimation of the ranks and it kept happening at a faster and faster pace as we aged. There was a period of a few years where I was going to funerals or memorial services at least once a month.
These were people my age or very close to my age. These were very lively, fun people in a close-knit work group. I began to think to myself, “wow,” I am really surrounded with a lot of death. When I would tell my other friends about this phenomenon I was experiencing, they could not relate to what I was going through. Their responses would be like, “gee, that’s weird, I experience a death of a friend or loved one every few years, maybe, but nothing like what you are experiencing.” It got to a point that most of my friends and co-workers were gone. I began to feel like the survivor of my work group. Then it hit me, this feeling I had was somewhat similar to the phenomenon of survivor’s guilt. Unconsciously I was thinking, why am I still here? All my friends are gone, many who I felt were a lot healthier and livelier than I.
So, I have a close relationship with the death experience. Even in college, I spent one summer living in and helping out in a mortuary. I would help the morticians during the day and I would be the caretaker of the mortuary all alone at night. (Don’t ask to see my pictures from those days. I’d even have friends come visit me at night and show them around and they would faint on me.) So, death has been no stranger to me.
So, this survivor’s guilt and my experiences have caused me to reflect on a lot on the end of life. Call me morbid if you must, but I see great value in not denying death but rather in reconciling myself to the inevitable. Do I have a fear of death? Most of the time, no, I don’t feel I do. On the other hand, yes, there are brief periods or terror regarding the end of it all (this earthly life). Fortunately, most of the time I’m okay with this birth, life, death thing. I am spiritual, but I also am human.
So, what’s the bottom line of all of this? Well, three years ago, my brother-in-law died in his sleep. It was the day before his seventy-eighth birthday. He had planned to go golfing with his wife (my sister) that morning and before going to bed he was saying how good he felt and how he was looking forward to the next day with great excitement. But the next day was not to be as he passed away early that morning as he slept.
That experience has really affected this whole “thinking of death” thing. Besides all my friends dying around me, this sudden death hit me hard. I realize that every day or every night could be it, my last day here. I’m very aware of this fact. I now really live every day as if it could be my last. I mean really, this is not just a trite saying for me. Every day I think, am I living this day as I would if I knew that this was my very last day on this earth?
So, I feel I’ve learned my lesson through all this experience with death. I have been blessed with a long life. A lot longer life than I expected in my early, very dark and depressed, pessimistic years. I love every minute of life. I do not get bored. I will not let the crap of this world knock me down any more. Like I’ve said in an earlier post,my personal religion is now very simple, “love, trust God, and *#$&/% the rest!” May we all find our peace with life and the life force, which I call “God.”
Wally