On Friday we walked a wee length of the Penicuik to Dalkeith walkway, looping back at the memorial to Kane McGinley the retained firefighter from Penicuik who died aged just 25yo. The memorial sent me down a rabbit hole thinking about public versus private grief. I hate to see supermarket flowers, dead and still in their plastic and I can rant all day about balloons "sent to heaven" but actually just littering the countryside but I read every inscription on park benches and feel a quiet sense of honour when I stumble on a memorial tucked away in a corner of farmland. I'm not one for a lot of performance grieving on Facebook but I did dine out for weeks on tales of some brilliantly inappropriate social media behaviour by others. I believe you tell your story because it might be someone else's self help guide and I want to know other people's stories. We need to talk about death more, it is after all the only certainty in life.
3 comments:
Everyone deals with death differently. I've never been sure how to respond to others in their grief as my family seemed to just brush it off.
My husband and I talk about death. That is the one thing he fears less than hospitals that want to keep him alive.
Memories of a loved one are in my mind and I do think of them often.
Roadside memorials seem to be popular in my part of the US. But they fade away with time.
My family is the same we pick up the pieces and we carry on. I don't fear death, I do fear a lot of old age though, luckily the women in my family tend to just keel over with massive heart attacks
My goodness! My Aunt did that and my other female relatives just keep on ticking in their late 80's, they are tough old birds.
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