Attaining summer ambitions

My summer agenda quickly attained a monstrous size. It seems I cannot estimate a reasonable number of books to read, the limit to travel before it becomes exhausting or the optimal number of classes for a summer session.

As a result, I inevitably return to Bloomington having accomplished far less than desired. Not only because I set an unattainable standard, but also because an increasing sense of failure leads to an even more disempowering surrender.

Still, the most challenging occasions tend to be unforeseeable. Attending another grandparent’s funeral, for example, was never an event I penciled in on this summer’s ideal to-do list.

I selected these examples because they are tidy opposites. Unfortunately, juxtaposing something that may seem incidental (an agenda conundrum) with the death of a grandmother risks making me appear frivolous.

However, the hopeful conclusion this contrast allows me to reach provides a more substantial insight: Where burdensome scheduling invites us to feel disappointment in spite of achievement, personal tragedy seems to offer a chance to progress because loss and grief are so near.

Since my grandmother’s death in July, I’ve again found myself questioning what “loss” really is.  I certainly don’t have an answer, but I am confident that I am not the first to feel it most acutely at life’s milestones.

At graduation celebrations, first jobs, holidays, marriages and significant events in our life, we wish the moment could be shared with those who helped us become the people we are today.

But at the same time, I feel relieved that death spares us from having to share certain facts with an older generation. They can never observe my non-attendance of church, modern sense of morality or any of a number of personal shortcomings.  There is comfort in knowing the dead cannot reassess their opinions of you.  

Maintaining an imagined connection with deceased loved ones has many appeals.  But by asking, “What would Grandpa or Grandma think now?” we arrive at two remarkably different classes of answers.

On the pleasant occasions we wish we could enjoy with them, this sort of questioning produces a gentle nostalgia. We remember what we always knew to be true about a loved one: They reciprocated our love and took pleasure in our successful progress in life.  Accordingly, we reaffirm our development as human beings and simultaneously recall the reasons we most loved them.

Yet forcing ourselves to approximate the opinions of the dead can also create a tremendous sense of guilt.  Imagining their incomprehension if they were to witness our different lifestyles can prompt us to withdraw from life’s possibilities, to cling only to what is safe instead of eagerly anticipating the future.

Supplying static, time capsule judgments for the deceased affords neither a valuable perspective on the evolving realities we face nor a fair and realistic portrayal of what someone might say had they continued living and accumulating relevant experience in contemporary matters.

Strangely, coming to terms with the need to release ourselves from this imaginary judgment may be the most difficult loss of all.


E­-mail: wallacen@indiana.edu