Denial is a River

“It’s Just a Bruise” — The Death of Ivan Ilych

You and I, we shall never know death or the dead. Don’t ask me who the people I loved were; I only know of those I love.

Maybe she never existed? Maybe, preferably, she’s still at her home, baking Roccocò and brewing some bad jokes to tell me over a visit on Sunday.

I ask you if you remember her, and you say yes, walking away. I grab the bookmark with her photo that the funeral services printed for us, and bring it to my heart. I don’t know why I am doing it; I don’t think she is dead. I know she is, but not really. In some ways, I don’t think my grandmother ever existed.

It feels, in some way, like she may just be in the other room — like in the perfect little quote from a Twitter account that goes:

i hope death is like being carried to your bedroom when you were a child & fell asleep on the couch during a family party. i hope you can hear the laughter from the next room

It’s not just death, but that is when the mind’s rush to denial is more obvious.

Traumatic events, fears, grief, and anxieties can all contribute towards making us the unreliable narrators of our own stories. And in some ways, it is perhaps better to forget after all. Disclaimer: I don’t know whether it would be favourable to advise people to live in avoidance, or to forever avoid the things they are in denial of. But I feel, in my heart of hearts, that sometimes avoidance and suppression make up the only shield with which we can safeguard our wellbeing, for a while. Some of us are not equipped with much else.

Surely it is something one must look into: equipping oneself with enough tools to deal with suffering, in ways psychologists would call adaptive. It is hard to imagine a world without scenarios that call for shutting everything out, especially given that there are things worse than death and loss, in this little life of ours.

Cognitively dissonant and a lazy researcher, I nevertheless know that, statistically speaking, avoidance, repression, and denial are usually incredibly bad for our mental — and, at times, physical (e.g., blood pressure) — health, especially in the long term. But they can be a useful tool short-term, in some cases, where it is strategically needed.

I know the fear of death is somewhat social and cultural; in fact, my first family death came as a shock beyond the trauma of loss. I literally could (can) not understand it.

There is something more idiosyncratic here, too; the fear of death — sometimes called thanatophobia — has been a loyal companion, a shadow of a crow, for many years. Only lately has it begun dissolving into something more foggy and maybe (really, maybe) less scary.

So how could I bring myself to not be in denial? Of course, I know she is gone. I know I will never see her again, and that I’ve lost the chance to learn everything I could have from her. But on some level, I don’t understand it, don’t believe it, and don’t accept it.

“He sought his former accustomed fear of death and did not find it. ‘Where is it? What death?’ There was no fear because there was no death.

In place of death there was light.”

— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

As paradoxes go, denial can impair actual memories of the event one is rejecting, but it seems to me that denial is in many ways a strange type of lie. It keeps the flame alive way longer than something like reinterpreting a situation or taking a different perspective would.

That is why it can’t work forever. But how can I expect you to just deal openly with that pain you carry? For the reasons you do.

One can also avoid, or completely deny, life itself. Perhaps the air never lost that smell of a breeze that one cannot define, or maybe day and night haven’t become so dry...you just closed yourself off to it. I try my best to accept and live in the permanent now of mindful theories and perspectives. I meditate, and it saves me (though unfortunately it is not a cure-all balm for everyone, or for everything, or forever). Then I think: is living only for the now not another form of denying the past and avoiding the future?

I have come to believe, experientially, that there is nothing but the present moment. But viscerally, I register the effects of yesteryears and the fears for tomorrow. This orienteering towards an inexistent future is an unfortunate by-product of my very, very anxious mind, but the problem with then denying these anxieties is that they come back to bite you in your dreams.

Once more, that may be the problem at the fulcrum of the valley of denial, avoidance, and repression: that things never really go away, and that you had better find a way to deal with them, because they are going to emerge at some point, despite your prayers and begging for mercy.

“We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?” said Gerasim, expressing the fact that he did not consider his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.

— Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych

Another unfortunate problem with denying death is that it’s everywhere. The cherry on top of this beautifully terrifying cake is that denying the death of someone you love clashes with your memories of them, which permeate far more of your life than you could have ever realised.

I want to continue successfully lying to myself. In fact, this essay was going to be about denial and avoidance as general concepts, and how they affect — or sometimes help — the general population in “everyday” times. Instead, I cannot escape the layers of grief that make up the bulk of my time and now the space in this essay.

Too often, I have wished the world would simply stop spinning, to truly be able to freeze existence in a single moment.

Paraphrasing Pascal, when writing about divertissement, we run away from death by filling our lives with noise, business, and distraction. If we were to sit quietly in a room and confront ourselves, we would be able to feel our nothingness. Pascal’s notion of divertissement foreshadows both modern psychology — avoidance, coping, suppression — and Tolstoy’s critique of superficial bourgeois life.

I think he was right, but he forgot that many of us already feel that nothingness so often and so loudly we are so filled with nihilism, loss, and fear that all we can do is re-learn how to distract ourselves with TV, friends, food, work, and whatever else.

I know now that next Easter there will be no Roccocò, no Pastiera, or even just the contentment and expectancy of spending a day around a long table, waiting for my grandma to bless me with holy water I had asked not to be “blessed with.” I’ll miss the banter; I know it. But I can’t let myself think about it more than superficially. Just deeply enough to talk about it, though perhaps not truly work through it.