the movies didn't tell me about death

I've been sitting with these thoughts for a very long time.

The funeral of Tony Stark.

This is what the movies didn’t tell me about death.

The movies didn’t tell me about phone calls to funeral homes or flipping through catalogs of caskets—oak, walnut, mahogany, biodegradable. At the time, I told myself this activity mattered. For her. Perhaps, deep down, I knew already it mattered only for us, the living.

The movies didn’t tell me about sitting in a plush conference room with the people closest to me in the world, trying to choose between colors and casket corners. Pietàs, crosses, praying hands, sacred hearts. We went with dragons.

They didn’t show me careful, earnest funeral directors, eager to please, to sell their services, to sign a client.

But not too eager. Someone died, you know.

The movies didn’t tell me about joking with the funeral home director who looked exactly like the sort of person you would cast as the funeral home director in a horror film.

They didn’t tell me about designing a funeral program or sending invites or deciding who will speak, and who will read Scripture, and who will pray, and in what order. They didn’t tell me about the intense possessiveness I would feel over someone I could no longer have and hold.

(At that point, you are just wedded to Death and working hand-in-hand. There is nothing but the all-consuming reality. With every invite to the service, every keystroke and conversation, you are saying, “She is dead. She is dead. She is dead.”)

The movies didn’t tell me about the sterile, forced comfort of the organ donation center. Or the representative who parades you by a “wall of heroes”—the unfortunate dead whose organs live on in other men, women, and children. They didn’t tell me I wouldn’t give a fuck about that wall or those “heroes” or organ donations because, if I could turn back time, I would.

The movies didn’t tell me that I’d inescapably watch myself do things because they were necessary.

Or that I would be separate from myself.

Or that noise would be silence.

Or that weight would be nothing.

Or about the ineffable waning of the day and the fear that there is another day, just like it, following behind and following behind and following behind. But only for some.

Others have run out of days.

And you must go on, because you cannot go the same way. Even though you will. Eventually.

(You must not cause another rip in the fabric. Not now. You must not deliberately drown the halls and invite the Dark Waters in.)

No film told me of the guilt I would feel the first time I laughed after Death passed over us and lingered still. How dare I? Is this what it is like to know darkness and light?

The movies never communicated the shock of saying her name in prayer as though she were still living. Sometimes, the brain wants to cheat on Death.

The movies did not tell me how my tongue would tie over whether to say “she is” or “she was.” Or about the mental break that occurs whenever I say to someone, “I have six siblings.” Do I? Should I specify who I have and who I had? “I cannot share one of them with you now.”

(You do not think about these things until you are asked.)

The movies do not tell you how you will desire silence and yet abhor it.

This silence is heavy with all the gods and all the angels and all the hosts of the past staring down at you impassably. Whether they abide in heaven or hell, they are all staring down. You are unenvied. They do not hear your screams or your cries or your prayers.

Death, to whom you are married, does not reason.

You sit in silence, and you hate it. The silence is too loud. You blast music to drown it out. And it does not satisfy.

The movies did not tell me this.

“…give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death.”

This time a year ago, my family sat in death’s yawning valley. I never imagined thoughts like this would come so soon. My sister graced our lives with her presence and was gone.