My aunt is going to rob my grandma's grave

[May 2022]

CW: Themes of death and suicide

I’ve been contemplating the meaning of life more often lately. Though ‘meaning’ isn’t the right word. I’m not sure whether I believe in meaning, per se. Life feels more like a random occurrence, serendipity. I take much objection to the idea that we were created with some goal or purpose in mind, that there is a task for us to fulfil.

I suppose that is precisely what I have been grappling with: that I simply do not see the point. We weren’t put on this earth, we merely are the result of crazy chance, and my life is no more significant than that of any other sentient being within it. So then, why bother? Why do I have to get up every morning, begrudgingly sit down to work away 8 hours a day, so that I can earn enough money to pay for the four walls that I inhabit, and the food that fuels my body, and the sports that keep my muscles from atrophying, and the subscriptions that entertain me long enough to make it to the next day to do it all again?

I’ve long held a pretty cynical and nihilistic view of life, but I think in the past I didn’t used to get overwhelmed by such uncontrollable feelings of existential dread and aimlessness. Not that I walk around in a thick fog of self-pity and suicidal ideation, but I thought it notable that in the past couple of months there were at least two or three moments where I found myself sitting on the couch, suddenly compelled to cry at how meaningless everything felt.

The irony of it all is that this comes at a time when I’ve had a month off of work between jobs, taking time to restore, rest, and decompress. On top of that, I am all good and therapised. I had stopped going to sessions maybe a month prior, because, for the time being, I couldn’t think of anything else pressing to work with my therapist on. So, we both agreed there was no need to see each other regularly anymore. I was feeling revolutionised, healthy, confident, and more resilient and functional than ever.

Then why now? Why under these circumstances do these uselessly painful feelings seek me out? Perhaps they were always there in some way, but they always came in the guise of current life adversity. Or I was always sufficiently distracted by other more immediate goals and milestones to really understand their origin. They could be blamed on the job I hate, and they’d go away once I’d find the courage to quit. They could certainly be blamed on the global-fucking-pandemic, which triggered never-seen-before levels of emergency and survival mode. They’d surely disappear as soon as things stabilized and I could free up mental space and time to focus on growth and self-development, on art, on people, on things that matter to me. If not that, my purpose would definitely reveal itself once I get that degree, hand in that project, or finish this stage of my life.

But all those things came and went, and the feelings remained, finally rearing their true form. Just pure, naked disquietude at the banality of the human condition, in a moment of my existence where everything is actually going pretty great.

I can tell that I am indeed therapised, because, in the past, these emotions might have thrown me heavily off-balance, sent me into a tail-spin of anxiety, leaving me to spend the rest of the evening straining to pull myself out of that dark pit my very own brain had just hurled me into. But now, I see these feelings, I acknowledge them. I might even entertain them for some time, but I know they will pass. They always have, so I trust they will continue to do so. I could still get better at distancing myself even further from them, becoming as close to an outside observer of them as possible, but already now, I’ve done pretty well at rewiring my brain to believe me when I tell it that it’ll be okay.

Minds are funny things like that. One moment I’ll be having a full-on existential crisis, the next I’ll be vacuum cleaning my house and a song will come on shuffle that will knock me off my feet and make me dance through the kitchen in complete exultation and awe at how wonderful merely existing on this earth can sometimes be. Then I’ll go on to make a smoothie out of leftover coconut milk and a can of lychees, which will be the literal best thing that happened to me that day, and I’ll feel very accomplished and grateful for it indeed.

Despite all of that, I do continue to feel this undercurrent of the sensation that I am merely floating from one life event to the next. The month off was incredibly fun, packed with trips and social calls and indulgences that I wouldn’t usually permit myself, like spending money without worrying about the balance on my bank account. It felt great, it felt freeing. Yet, I felt like I had fallen short of all the plans I had made at the start of the month: to write, to read, to sew, to learn, to create. I had the expectation to finally unlock all my true potential in this brief escape from the daily capitalistic pressures.

But the reality was that I felt more exhausted than ever, underestimating how truly draining aggressive self-care can be. So, in the end, I felt like I was drifting from one plan to another, unable to fully appreciate any of them, because somewhere beneath it all I was pulled along by a draft that served no greater purpose, that had no concrete goal it was flowing toward.

I think what is really going on, or so I’d like to believe, is that I am currently a little disconnected from my ambitions. I miss the feeling of working toward or building something. But I know this to be a fallacy, because at the time of writing, I am four months away from starting a new Master study in a subject I am deeply passionate about and which I look forward to immensely. So then maybe it’s all just a matter of patience, or lack thereof, and the situation I find myself in right now serves as a lesson. A lesson in being patient and kind, most of all with myself, a lesson in living life mindfully and appreciatively, and a lesson in how maybe, life isn’t supposed to feel meaningful and grandiose all the time, or even hardly ever. But at the end of the day, if you can call yourself content, then why take issue in the first place?

---

Anyway, so my grandmother died last week.

And if I wasn’t contemplative about the pointlessness of life already, this really sealed the deal.

Personally, her death did not affect me greatly. She stopped being in my life regularly around my 5th birthday, perhaps, so the news did not lead to the type of grief a family member’s death might typically evoke. More relevant to me were the grief and coping of my mother and aunt, who had been living with and caring for her for the past decade. So, to support them, I promptly booked flight tickets to come visit.

The anticipation of my trip filled me with a little more tension and apprehension than usual, my relationship with my family already being strained and peculiar on any other given day, this occasion only adding unforeseen dimensions of suffering.

During a phone conversation in the days leading up to my stay at theirs, my aunt had progressed from a numb state of apathy at the passing of her already frail and senile mother, to deep, deep sadness and regret. The pain was palpable even across the shitty Whatsapp connection, as she lamented to me how much she missed her mother and wished she was still there. She cried how she did not know how to go on, her life feeling meaningless and without direction, now that the task of caring for her sick mother was no longer bestowed upon her. Her business ventures failing, the money running out, and watching herself only getting older, she was despairing at the destabilizing wound this death suddenly ripped into her world.

As much as I wanted to be there for her, to lend a listening ear, as the least I could do, I was at a loss for comforting words and couldn't bring myself to let her sorrow any nearer than a generic “I am so sorry”.

I was afraid that the hollowness she felt would only compound and exacerbate my own demons that I’d been fighting to keep at bay the past weeks. I was scared that my family’s ache would tip me over that edge of darkness that I could feel creeping up within me every now and again. So, I decided to restrict any contact before my arrival to a minimum, keeping myself distracted until then.

To my pleasant surprise, none of the trip was as bad as I had feared. My mere presence seemed to lift everybody’s spirits, providing reprise and disruption to a routine otherwise marked by an absence. I took happy note of my emotional availability and patience for every single spiel of my aunt’s I had to sit through - granted, I was the one who invited them by asking her to “tell me things”. I shouldn’t have assumed she would understand that what I actually meant was “tell me things about grandma and your life with her”.

Staying with my aunt and mom tends to be exhausting, not only because of generic familial conflict and differences of opinions, but also because every time I go to them, I am confronted with my complicated relationship with my mother and my sense of obligation and responsibility toward her. To distil this complexity into one sentence would be: I love my mother because that is what is expected of me, not because I ever felt much of a motherly bond toward her. Similarly, my aunt only started appearing regularly in my life once she took her sister in. Paying them visits often felt more like duty than anything else.

While, remarkably, this one was the most positive visit I had made to this part of the family, pretty much ever, the entirety of it was tinted by a feeling of uncertainty. Despite my aunt having spent the last decade complaining that her choice to take in my sick grandmother followed by my sick mother had robbed her of her freedom to travel and live according to her own wishes, her abrupt grief overshadowed this once all-consuming regret. She suddenly expressed all these feelings about blood being stronger than water after all, and remorse at having treated her mother unfairly, failing to consider the true nature of her Alzheimer’s.

This situation brought to the forefront of my mind a scenario I had morbidly tried to imagine times before. What would happen the day my own mother died? What would I feel? How would I grieve? How much would it hurt? I always thought I might selfishly be relieved, knowing that the burden of her care would no longer fall on me. Also, the weight of living for her and feeling like I am the only thing that gives meaning to her existence, would finally be lifted from my shoulders.

I think I may feel sadness and regret at a mother lost, but it bears mentioning that I have been grieving my mother for years. My therapist asked me once, whether I have been able to grieve my mother and the loss of any type of normal mother-daughter relationship I might have had, and I didn’t know what to answer. I asked her, “How does one grieve?”

I think I have, and continue to do so, as I have come to accept that I will never have a mother like most other people do. So, perhaps her eventual death will simply be the last step in that grieving process. The final and complete loss of something that had started decaying the day I was born.

But seeing my distraught aunt gave me pause. Called into question these assumptions I had made about my own coping mechanisms. Will I be overcome by untold feelings of anguish and regretfulness the day I am faced with a death that hits closer to home? I guess one cannot ever really know until that day does come, the truth being that I don’t know whether I would prefer it to come sooner or later.

And the morning my aunt woke me to crawl into bed next to me and reflect on her mother’s death and plans for the future, I couldn’t help but feel jarred and taken aback, but also a guilty alleviation. It’s not every day you hear somebody talking quite so openly about not wanting to suffer the same fate as her recently deceased mother, hence plotting a way to take her own life efficiently and in a moment of her choosing. And then convincing her sister to follow her lead.

Though I had to agree with her sentiment of not wanting to waste away the last years of life in a helpless stupor, the knot in my throat grew as she told me that my mother would accept this, if it weren’t for her “Anwesenheitspflicht” in my life. “Duty of being present”. I felt a stab to my conscience at the cruel thought crossing my mind that it is not so much me that needs her in my life, but her that needs me.

And therein lies one more reason I cannot bear being with my mother for too long. It pains me too much to watch her exist in her severely limited world, the world that now even has been deprived of the immediate purpose of caring for her mother, leaving her to float from one day to the next in an endless loop of triviality. What is there left for her to dream of? I have to push the thought of her unrealised potential, her colourful life turned flat greyscale, out of my mind, lest it fester into overwhelming sorrow.

Perhaps this is why questions of purpose and meaning plague me, because I have witnessed my mother’s prospects doused by trauma and physical and mental illness. I have witnessed my aunt’s possibilities suffocated by duty, paranoia and circumstance. Maybe the demons that paralyse me occasionally, and let the tears flow from my eyes as I sit petrified on the sofa, actually are my mind straining and thrashing against the hazard of following any of my family’s footsteps, and I can consider myself lucky that their presence vigorously reminds me to keep working to avoid becoming something I couldn’t live with.

For all the moments that were heavy and difficult during my stay, there were also some lighter ones. Most notably, the day my aunt came rushing down to tell me a piece of good news. Her friend Heinz had come up with the solution. The solution to a problem whose existence I was not yet aware of.

My mother had wanted to take my grandmother’s ashes home, to keep close and potentially bring back to spread in her home country of Vietnam. However, German law does not permit this. The urn must be buried, perhaps to prevent people from spreading remains where you’d really not want any (I’ve recently found out that the employees at Disney World have to deal with more than their fair share of human ashes on a daily basis). So, Germans being Germans, those shenanigans are promptly cut out. But I should always remember to never underestimate my aunt’s disregard for German bureaucracy and correctness.

“We found a way!”, she exclaimed, “We are going to dig up your grandmother once she is buried. The ground will be soft still and we’ll do it when nobody is around. Your mother can be the lookout. It’s perfect!”

We all stood around in a circle, laughing at this moment of complete absurdity - although I was 99% sure my aunt was completely serious. My mom joined in the banter, cackling at the idea of her keeping watch, a genuine excitement in her voice. And there we stood for a little longer, scheming and planning, indulging in that small victory and the humour it entailed. Letting it relieve our pain momentarily and giving us a reason to keep living to see another day. Perhaps that is all we ever needed.