On 4 July 2024 there is a General Election here in the UK.
It would also have been Kate’s 63rd birthday, had she not succumbed to breast cancer on 13 July 2017, shortly after completing her 56th year.
As is now customary, we shall walk to the place where her ashes were scattered, celebrate her life and remember the immense contribution she made to the lives of so many others, not least our own.
Each year, as the day approaches, I reflect here on my ongoing experience of bereavement, specifically the premature loss of one’s partner. This is partly catharsis and partly directed at others wrestling with the same experience.
This year I have been thinking philosophically, about how, as time passes, we hold on to the most meaningful memories of our former partners.
Is it still possible to recall their quintessence – by which I mean their identity; their unique self – as we experienced it when they were alive?
There are typically photographs, of course, some handwriting, maybe, and possibly even the recorded sound of our partner’s voice.
I have the photographs and the handwriting. But they don’t really embody the quintessence of Kate, as I knew and loved her.
Perhaps this tangible evidence of her existence – her physical appearance at different moments and the way she expressed herself in writing – are no more than prompts, like listening to her favourite music, touching her favourite earrings, or reading her favourite book.
While listening to the radio recently, I heard someone ask what our reaction would be if AI was harnessed to create a lifelike avatar of our deceased partner.
I suspect our instinctive distaste has something to do with knowing that even a perfect replica would not embody the quintessence of our loved one: it would be a soulless mannequin merely.
Nowadays, as my memory fades, the prompts I retain are leading me somewhere subtly different.
It becomes harder and harder to recall the quintessence of Kate as a single, solid entity – her self.
Instead, that has dissipated into something more amorphous and diffuse – an enveloping intuition rather than a clear understanding; a subjective instinct rather than a verifiable fact.
This change has coincided with the working through of grief: misery adjusting to stubborn sadness; stubborn sadness becoming less acute; sadness replaced by an occasional gentle yearning, increasingly rare as the years pass by.
If I am fortunate, these vaguer, more intuitive memories will survive, more or less intact, until my own end.
Then my ‘version’ of who Kate was will disappear.
And, when the last person to remember Kate alive is dead, in another half-century or so, the final vestiges of Kateness will also disappear.
For, even if she had made a mark on history, only the mark itself would be preserved, not the self of she who made the mark. A variety of ‘prompts’ might remain – photographs, handwriting, a biography, a gravestone, a record in a family tree, possibly even a #Kateday – but her quintessence would be gone forever.
Our insistence, while we are alive, on remembering the dead is part of our instinctive protest against the human condition.
As I see it, our invention of a supernatural immortality after death, reuniting us with our deceased loved ones, is part of that same protest.
But all such protests are ultimately futile because, like everyone’s body, everyone’s self has a finite lifespan.
Rather than denying this, our fingers in our ears, arguably we should seek to come to terms with the nullity, void, abyss or chaos over which our lives are suspended temporarily, and into which we fall when they end.
If we can be consoled by our own mortality, rather than remaining aghast at it, we might be in a better place when the time comes to face our own death.
But this is so very hard, precisely because of the human condition: we are all genetically programmed to fight for our survival, even when we know death is imminent. We value our lives above all else.
The conditioned human response is to manufacture, above this chaos, our personal bridge, constructed from numerous beliefs, behaviours and strategies.
It suspends us safely, preventing us from thinking too much about the emptiness beneath, preventing death from having dominion, keeping Kurtz’s ‘horror’ at bay (my apologies for inserting a literary reference).
It may be helpful to deconstruct elements of our bridge, removing some of this personal scaffolding, so we can see and acknowledge the chaos beneath.
This too is hard, because the scaffolding gives us comfort, shutting out a truth that we’d really rather not face until we must.
It is so much easier to pin our hopes on a supernatural afterlife.
TD
June 2024
timdracup.com 