Death of Connections

Posted Tue Jun 8, 2004 in

SunsetI’m still ruminating over connections. It’s something that’s been on my mind for awhile and I’ve been writing about it over the last few days.

Some connections are broken by death. Such connections are simply terminated. The death of a person we’re connected to is always hard. In fact, my thoughts were stimulated by a posting I came across a few days ago, when I came across a couple of reflections on connections by Kim du Toit entitled Helpless and Throwing it All Away.

On death, du Toit says:

As I see it, the middle bit is the difficult one—where the person dying is a sibling, or a close friend, and what’s interesting is that with the death of an elder, one loses a piece of the past; with the death of a child, one loses the future.

And with the death of a contemporary, one loses the present and the future.

That’s the tough part, isn’t it? Loss is loss, but losing the present, the past (in my opinion anyway), and the future just sucks. The connections exist and they’re strong. And when the loss hits, it devastates. Death by suicide is the most damaging break of connections because of the emotional fallout that’s inevitably left behind. du Toit goes on to say:

But I think that when you throw your life away, you only get a free pass when you’re under the age of twenty and over the age of seventy. Between those times, and before you become old and have fulfilled all your obligations, you have a goddamned responsibility to others to keep on living…

This is a hard thought. I’m not sure I’m willing to live with the responsibility to everyone I’m connected with. But, it sure gives pause to think, doesn’t it, this idea that we are responsible to our connections? It reinforces the idea that they are two-way and require work to keep alive.