Death is a lot of things; it’s sad, tragic, difficult, but above all, death is just weird. It’s just plain fucking weird that this person is no longer there. Months, years afterward, you think to yourself about having a conversation with them and you can’t. It’s impossible. This is very very weird and it’s very hard for the human mind to deal with, and I think that’s why people imagine they can talk to the dead, whether via prayer or a ouiji board or John Edwards.
I’ve been reading recently about how when we operate devices or manipulate things, our brain essentially considers the object under control as part of the body. Like when driving, the feedback you feel from the steering wheel, your ears, your eyes, is barely different from the way you process things while walking or running. Or when swinging a hammer, you become adept at the sensation of hitting a nail; you can feel when you’ve missed or hit off-center. And I wonder if our brains don’t conceptualize outside minds in a similar way. Do our minds assimilate other people’s minds in the same way we assimilate tools?
I think so. I think we form a mental model of the people in our lives. They’re fuzzy and full of quick-draw stereotypes when we first meet and assess them, but gradually we understand them better and begin to empathize with their feelings and predict their decisions with greater accuracy.
This maybe explains some of the difficulty with death. When someone important dies, it’s as though part of you is gone; whereas before you’d put off making decisions until talking to this person, now you’ve lost that part of your decision making apparatus (for lack of better terms). Or if this person was someone whose opinions you respected, and whose views on politics or philosophy or whatever served as a reaction around which to form your own, their sudden non-existence may make dealing with future problems a difficult proposition.
Everything changes when someone important dies, as far as I can tell. One’s self is left with holes, for an intelligence and heart which one previously relied upon has vanished.
