You’ve Been Eliminated

“With a heavy heart I’m writing to let you know that *Amy passed away Monday morning peacefully in her sleep.”

Name changed for privacy

You know those reality TV shows, where there is a picture of each member, and as they are voted off of the show, one of the pictures turns gray every week?

It seems like such a ridiculous comparison; being booted from a TV show for entertainment, and someone losing their life to a ridiculous and heartless disease. Nevertheless, the connection is there.

I’ve already lost count of how many of these messages I’ve read. It’s the message that comes up in your support group when someone is taken from us too soon. No matter how many times it happens, you’re never ready, you’re never expecting it, and you’re always shocked.

I’m pretty sure everyone has the same reaction. It is grief, after all. It has a pattern. A cycle. If you’re familiar with it, you know that it doesn’t really end. You cycle back through it. Rinse, wash, repeat. It does get a little bit easier as you process the same loss over and over again. I tell people who ask that you will never forget. It will never go away. Anyone who tells you it will is lying, in my personal opinion. What will happen, however, is it will get easier. You will start to remember with more joy than tears. It won’t punch you in the gut as often. It’s a little less violent.

After seeing a version of this reflected in a humorous way on the show, Jane the Virgin, I am convinced many of us go through a full mini-cycle of this when we learn about these kind of deaths on a consistent basis.

The Kübler-Ross model of grief represents five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I think this leaves out one initial stage. It leaves out the stage of shock. It seems like a rather important one to me, because it describes what you’ll later refer to as a trigger. That first moment when you learn of a death, and the world stops for just a moment.

It’s not like anything else you hear in a day. Someone’s life is over. Many other lives are affected. Some more so than others. When it comes to illness, especially a shared illness among people in a support group, it’s not just someone. It’s someone like you. It could have been you. So the world stops. You stop.

For a moment, sometimes a very brief moment, and sometimes for a lot longer, there is nothing. Only shock. Only the words. You don’t process them. You just understand what they mean. I learned in therapy that the word for this is dissociation. At least, this is my first reaction. And I suspect this is the reaction people describe as shock.

It’s the same feeling you have when you have a grief attack. That’s what I call a Moments when all of this bubbles to the surface and it feels like it just happened. Even 20 years later, it can feel like yesterday. It just takes a trigger. Something that reminds me of that moment, and it’s like I’m transported there. It’s the same feeling of shock every time.

I recently received news that somebody who is critical in my life was diagnosed with a very dangerous disease, that could end in death. I knew I was not reacting correctly. But I went about my business, took care of some of the related issues, and it wasn’t until that evening, at least 12 hours later, that I broke down and the reality of what was at risk hit me. I wanted to call my old therapist and say, “I get it now. I understand dissociation now. To the point that I know when it’s happening.”

Today when I received news that someone in my support group had passed away, in my mind, I saw the name fading. Knowing people through a support group, especially when it’s for a terminal illness or one that has no cure and can become terminal at any moment, means you get very close very fast. You learn to trust people you have never met in real life in a way that you don’t trust anyone in your “real” life. Which makes those people very real.

Sometimes you don’t even have a face to associate with a name, but you know the name very well. You get used to seeing the same names responding when you post about serious and complicated issues. You start to associate those names with a feeling of being cared for. Of being understood by somebody who gets it. For me, my condition is only diagnosed in one person out of every million per year. I’ve never met anyone else in person that has my disease. So the only people who “get it” in my life ARE those names for whom I have no face to connect. Other than a profile picture or pictures shared since I met them. (This might be a good time to mention that sick people don’t often like taking pictures of themselves. So it’s probably not a surprise that most of the profile pictures are not actually pictures of people.)

After hearing or reading that somebody has passed, I sit in disbelief for a minute. However brief, even if I don’t recognize the name at all, I still experience that numb initial moment of shock and disbelief. I question whether I would’ve been ready if today had been my day. What if I’ve been meaning to do that I still haven’t done? This many people later, why haven’t I done them?

Then there is, for at least a moment, a feeling of denial. No matter how many times it happens, there’s a little person inside of you that screams, “NO!” Every single time. Stage one of the five stages. Or stage two if you’re counting my extra one.

And then it’s sort of feels like I experience the rest of them all at once. Anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It’s almost as if we live in a constant state of grief once you enter this world, and each time you learn about another death, it’s just a surge of all of these emotions. But somehow, still always, shock.

That moment where we realize one of the people who entered this game in reality just got… eliminated from the game. There is silence. We all entered together. We’ve all had a core experience in common. It has gotten real many times. We’ve seen this happen before. We all know this is going to happen. And happen again. And again. And again. And still again. We all know the next one could be us.

And then we have to go back to life. Knowing that some people are not getting to go back to life after this. We have to keep moving as if everything is OK. Please understand that we carry those gray pictures with us. And they pile up. You start with one, then you have a few, then you can’t remember how many you have. But it’s a wall. It’s a wall in your mind with profile pictures fading away… much faster than they should.

If only it was a reality TV show that would end with the players back in the game of Real Life.