Death | Bethany Bassett

Tag: Death

An HSP Watches the News

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 8 Comments

At the bidding of a friend, I finally took the Highly Sensitive Person test this morning and ended up selecting 25 of the 27 points. (14 are enough to classify someone as a HSP, so I assume 25 means something like Watch Out, This Person May Spontaneously Combust At Any Moment.) This explains a lot about how I operate in general and how I processed last week in particular. According to the book on which the test is based, we combustible folk absorb more of the environment around us and thus become more overwhelmed than the 80-85% of the population with normally functioning brain-filters. Therefore, if—hypothetically—I spent a week hearing about the atrocities committed by ISIS in Iraq, watching Humans of New York give faces to those suffering in the Middle East, revisiting my old depression diaries in response to Robin Williams’s suicide, and following the shocking play of events in Ferguson, I might—hypothetically—have trouble unpeeling myself from bed in the morning.

I have been heartbroken by the news, and this has been bothering some people.

Some people have not been heartbroken by the news, and this has been bothering me.

Everywhere I’ve looked this last week, humanity has confronted me: prejudice and suffering and community and callousness and hope and no-hope and initiative and frustration and rhetoric and rawness and so many conflicting interpretations of which rights we should allow to those different from us. As a species, we have yet to mutually agree to each other’s right to live; opinions just get more fragmented from there. And it’s all so much, so very much, so close to too much for my porous mind to bear.

“A billion people died on the news tonight
But not so many cried at the terrible sight
Well Mama said, It’s just make-believe
You can’t believe everything you see
So baby, close your eyes to the lullabies
On the news tonight”

Over the weekend, I was pulled in by this passage from my favorite book, in which 12-year-old Douglas Spaulding is confronting the reality of death:

“At the cowboy matinee last Saturday a man had dropped down dead on the white-hot screen. Douglas had cried out. For years he had seen billions of cowboys shot, hung, burned, destroyed. But now, this one particular man…
He’ll never walk, run, sit, laugh, cry, won’t do anything ever, thought Douglas. Now he’s turning cold. Douglas’s teeth chattered, his heart pumped sludge in his chest. He shut his eyes and let the convulsion shake him.
He had to get away from these other boys because they weren’t thinking about death, they just laughed and yelled at the dead man as if he still lived. Douglas and the dead man were on a boat pulling away, with all the others left behind on the bright shore, running, jumping, hilarious with motion, not knowing that the boat, the dead man and Douglas were going, going, and now gone into darkness.”

This is how it is for me, how it is when I hear that a child has been beheaded by a terrorist group in Iraq or a teenager shot by police in Missouri or a comedian hung by his own fractured mind in California. I feel the loss of life like a blow to my head, and the weight of all the things that person will no longer do or see or experience or be sends concentric shock waves through my system. Do you feel it too? The immense mushroom cloud of tragedy balled up in that single word, dead?

If you don’t, that’s okay. At least, I’m doing my very best to accept that it’s okay. According to the test I took this morning, Douglas Spaulding, Jack Johnson, and I are among a small percentage of people who feel everything deeply. This doesn’t mean that others feel nothing; it just means they have a thicker layer of protection between themselves and the goings on in the world. It just means that they can watch the news, compartmentalize what they’ve seen, and go on with their days.

When I watch the news, I fall in headfirst.

My conscience has waffled back and forth for years on the topic: Should I stay up to date on events as a responsible and caring citizen of Earth? Or should I avoid the news as much as possible in order to spare my heart and mind from constant overload? Should I engage the negativity, or should I retreat from it? Is awareness worth taking nightly boat trips alone with the dead? I haven’t reached a conclusion yet that gives me peace, and maybe that’s because the world is so far from a place of peace. As long as I continue to be a Highly Sensitive Person in a highly human world, I’m going to struggle with a weight that most people don’t often feel. Every news link I click in my lifetime will carry a price.

I’ve been thinking though that if I were the one in the news this last week, if it were my death being announced in professional newscasterly tones and argued about by a parade of talking heads, I would want someone out there to cry for me. I would want the loss of my life to mean enough even to a complete stranger in another country that she would lose sleep over it. I would want her to get willingly into that boat with me, away from the motion and noise, out where I was no longer a news story but a full human carrying the sum of my years and experiences and aspirations with me off the edge of the world.

So I’m here… not seeking out the news today but not hiding from it either, not exactly loving my status as Highly Sensitive Person but not exactly wanting to trade it out either. If my role in this sea of humanity is to care—even too much, even beyond my own pain threshold—then I’ll care to the best of my ability. And if your role is different, I’ll do my best to remember that you’re the normal one here… and that whenever I spontaneously combust over the ten o’clock news, you’re the one who can put out the flames.

19Dec

Above the Cloud-Line

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 7 Comments

The sun rose this morning. It rose, and I blinked and then ran for the camera because I hadn’t seen that kind of light in days. Certainly not since Friday.

After the initial gut-pounding shock and the waves of salty-wet grief and the anger carved onto journal pages and the carefully chosen conversations, I find myself in the next stage of my own post-Newtown journey: the doldrums. My soul wants nothing so much as a long nap, an utterly unconscious respite from the knowledge of evil, and my heart is trying to offset this weariness by emotionally disconnecting from it all.

I’ve stayed away from the news and social media these last two days out of fierce necessity, and now the facts of the shooting keep melting down the sides of my mind like timepieces in a Dalí painting. I can’t grasp anything. I can no longer feel the twenty-seven concurrent stabs of horror, the chest-wracking sadness, or the wild urge to do something, anything to change the way our world works. Feeling has been replaced with fog.

I know that the internal process of grief is not a matter of right way versus wrong way, yet I’m convinced I’m making a mess of it. I’m sure either that I feel too intensely, presuming a deeper connection to the victims than I have a right to, or that I feel too little, dishonoring the tragedy through numbness. I’m afraid that my timetable won’t fit into appropriate standards, that I’ll start forgetting about Sandy Hook before a mere slip of a week has passed or that I’ll be hanging onto it long after the rest of the world has laid it to rest. I don’t know when it will be okay to write about other things again, to absorb myself in this life that’s moving onward even as the lives of twenty-seven Connecticut families have shattered to a stop. At the same time, I don’t know if I should already have left them in peace.

In this swirl of unknowing, with sorrow simultaneously fresh and faraway and time playing tricks on my eyes, the sunrise is pure gift. It’s the most visual display of hope I could imagine—a light bigger than this world and beyond our ability to destroy, its effects constant even below the cloud-line, its rise after days of gray a reminder that darkness doesn’t have the final say. Ever.

17Dec

Our Right to Thumbs

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 2 Comments

As soon as I opened Facebook this morning, the site recommended two pages for me based on my friends’ likes:

Guns and Shooting.

Guns and Shooting, and my friends’ names alongside pixelated thumbs of approval. Guns and Shooting, and a Facebook feed bristling in defense of assault rifles. Guns and Shooting, and quotes from religious figures implying that God allowed the tragedy as an act of revenge on a school system that no longer sponsors him. Guns and Shooting, and the caps-locked screams of loved ones fighting for their unhindered right to weapons of destruction.

As a culture (and I speak in sweeping generalities here), we Americans have accepted that violence can only be counteracted with more violence. We see war as 100% necessary and place our hope in the Jack Bauers of the nation. We think that the only way to defend ourselves from guns is to put more guns into circulation. We claim that if only the Sandy Hook teachers had been packing heat, Friday’s tragedy would have been averted. We believe in our hearts that we will have to use deadly force against another human being at some point in our lives, so it’s best to be prepared. We state that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but we forget to count ourselves among the potential killers because we’re on the good guy team.

We respond to the massacre of twenty young children by defending the weapons that killed them.

As a child, I had fun shooting targets and small animals, and the cold cruelty of a machine made to destroy never entered my mind. Guns were just something every family kept in the coat closet. Even at university, when a classmate was expelled for stockpiling weapons and ammunition in his dorm room, I absorbed friends’ indignation on his behalf. “He would never use them to hurt anyone!” we all said. And on this point, we were probably right. My classmate enjoyed hunting, and where could he store his gear if not in his dorm room?

However, our university had rules in place to reduce the risk of mass murders, so they expelled the student who, regardless of motives, had stocked up on devices specifically designed to kill. And this is what the gun debate comes down to for me—risk reduction. No, there is no amount of legislation that will prevent psychopaths or terrorists from enacting violence. Yes, there will always be a healthy black market for weapons of destruction. Yes, people should have the right to defend themselves, especially on their own property. No, peace is never guaranteed.

But can we just step back for a moment from the mentality that violence is our birthright? Can we stop letting fear dictate our morals? Can we have the courage to take a fraction of the risk off the shoulders of innocent schoolchildren and hold it ourselves, in their stead? Rather than amending our lifestyles and outlooks and job descriptions to include more violence, can we consider amending the availability of its instruments?

I am not arguing to abolish gun ownership altogether, though my husband and I believe that as followers of Jesus, we need to take his teachings on nonviolence to heart. However, we need to talk and talk hard about why civilians are allowed to own assault machinery, why it’s easier to get bullets than to get Sudafed, and why the fiercest fight in the aftermath of Newtown is waged on behalf of the murder weapons.

We need to consider what we are saying about human life with our thumbs-up.

~~~

Further reading:

On Violence by D.L. Mayfield, who shares her thoughts on how to do radical pacifism

Breaking News, Bearing Arms by Rebecca Woolf, whose husband is with her today because of his stance on nonviolence

Do We Have the Courage to Stop This? by Nicholas Kristof, who shows that we’re more worried about regulating ladders than about regulating firearms

Speed Kills by William Saletan, who holds Friday’s tragedy up against school attacks outside the U.S.

God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule by The Onion, who brilliantly, profanely, and heartbreakingly speaks the obvious

Love Your Enemies by Jesus, who lived it

Feel free to add your own suggested links in the comments!

15Dec

Grateful to Care

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 5 Comments

Today’s my day off from writing—a day allocated for errands and ironing and all manner of riffraff that didn’t get seen to during the week. Yet I can’t not write today. I have a desperate desire to make sense of yesterday’s massacre, though I realize there is no sense to be made, nothing that could possibly make the murder of twenty young children into something as succinct and graspable as sense. Still, writing down the whirlwind in my head makes it easier to keep my footing. A little.

I have a kindergartener, and I don’t say this to claim dibs on grief or to cheapen a single facet of people’s heartache or even to play the I’m-so-glad-it-wasn’t-my-child card that has to twist dagger sharp in the ears of bereaved parents. I say it because my kindergartener trotted off to class yesterday morning hand-in-hand with a friend, their little heads bobbing in enthusiasm, and that that could have been a death march… that we live in a world where a room of bright and busy and trusting five-year-olds can be sprayed with .223-caliber slugs… it’s unendurable.

This heartbreak feels so literal, the actual sinews in my chest threatening to rip loose, and I know you’re feeling it too. We’re all breaking apart and trying to hold ourselves together in different ways, whether by anger or action or silence or advice or prayer or time with loved ones or time alone. My social media feeds are full of opposing viewpoints, but they all come from a similar ferocity of grief, and I’m comforted, like Mr. Rogers, by seeing “so many caring people in this world.”

Every one of us is shouldering a tiny portion of the pain that the Newtown parents are going through right now. Every one of us is united in grief, though we might process it very differently (and that’s ok). Evil was done yesterday, and we care. It doesn’t make sense of the violence and pain we experience to different degrees in this broken world, but it does lighten the load.

I’m grateful to care alongside you.

4May

Fwd: Crusade

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 7 Comments

Three of the contacts in my e-mail address book have yet to realize that the Age of Forwards is dead. All three are relatives, and they tend to take some strong political stances that I don’t share, so for the sake of staying on good terms with my family at large, I usually delete these forwards without a glance. Today, however, two of them sent the same e-mail, and I made the mistake of reading it:

“Saturday, May 8, 2010 is WALK NAKED IN AMERICA DAY!
If a Muslim male looks upon a naked woman, other than his wife, he must commit suicide. In an effort to help weed out neighborhood terrorists, all women in America are asked to walk out of their house at 1:00pm, completely naked, and circle their neighborhood block for one hour.”

I felt sick, perhaps even more than I did a few weeks ago when that Facebook status was making the rounds. You probably saw some variation of it: “Dear God, I noticed you’ve been taking my favorite celebrities, and I just wanted you to know that Obama is my favorite president.”

But this isn’t a post about politics. This is about death.

~~~

Yesterday, a woman I had never met passed away. Her husband was one of my university classmates, but I hadn’t kept up with his life until last week when their story spread among my circle of acquaintances. She was six months pregnant with their fourth child when she had to undergo an emergency operation to remove cancerous spots from her lungs. She went into cardiac arrest. The baby was delivered healthy, albeit extremely premature, but my schoolmate’s wife slipped away after a few days of desperate attempts to save her life.

I did not know this woman personally, and from what I’ve heard about her, we would not have had a lot in common. However, I joined the thousands of friends and supporters hoping, praying for a miracle, and I now grieve her death along with them. Her children will grow up without her goodnight kisses. Her husband will face the difficult decisions ahead alone. Everyone who loved her, everyone who would have come to love her, every person she would have touched along the corridors of a full-term life is now bereft. Nothing about this is remotely funny.

I think of our next door neighbors in the States, a married couple with a young son and a taxi business. We swapped power tools, shared watermelon in the backyard, and tried together to help a neighborhood boy caught in a tragic situation. They gave us Natalie’s first bicycle. The husband mowed our lawn along with his. They also happened to be devout Muslims. If we categorized them as terrorists for their belief in Allah, we would deserve to be categorized as Crusaders for our belief in God. However, prejudice is probably a reality they have learned to put up with a long time ago.

But to joke about forcing our next-door neighbor to commit suicide? To turn the idea of leaving his son fatherless, his wife widowed, and his friends brokenhearted into some kind of patriotic comedy? To quip about tricking God into offing the president? To slap an animated gif onto a death wish and call it funny? It makes me see stars. That professed Christians can be not simply callous but malicious about other people’s lives shocks, saddens, and enrages me all at once, and I have to say… sentiments like that help me understand where a terrorist might find motivation in the first place.

12Sep

Soaring

Posted by: Bethany in Uncategorized 7 Comments

“It’s that time of year,
Leave all our hopelessnesses aside,
If just for a little while;
Tears stop right here.”
~ Imogen Heap

My grandma passed away this morning in her sleep, just a few months shy of her 90th birthday. I nodded and mm hmmed matter-of-factly during the phone call like I had been expecting it, but in reality, I just didn’t know how else to react. I feel oddly disconnected here, as if grief politely stays on its own continent.

My memories of her flit in and out like animated Polaroids, grainy and mauve-tinted. We weren’t particularly close for many years—Granddad was the one with the root beer floats and sense of adventure while Grandma hovered nearby with a feather duster —but I knew she loved me. Beyond loving me, she approved of me in her gentle, pale pink way. My soul could flow free-form around her, a rare and deeply precious gift to my girlhood.

She gave me the best Christmas gift a ten-year-old girl could fathom: three colors of pastel eye shadow, a dark teal eyeliner, and the first glimmer of hope that my heart was worthy of a little glamor. She let me raid her closet and dress up as the socialite in my daydreams. She let me grow up at my own pace and didn’t question when I poured myself a coffee at age 15; she simply poured herself a matching mug and sat down with me to chat. She trusted me with family taboos and hurts, she asked me when she needed help, and she always cared. She cried the last time she hugged me goodbye.

Her soul was a bird, I think—fragile-boned and forever swooping between the vast weight of our atmosphere and heaven. As delicate as my grandma was, all vintage crystal and mist inside her skin, life couldn’t break her. Not that it didn’t try, but hardships were no match for that determined, devoted heart. In a childhood journal, I once wrote that I would be devastated if she died. Then, it was true. But now… I just want to cheer her on; gravity has lost its grip on my precious grandma, and she can finally soar.