Haec credam a deo pio, a deo justo, a deo scito?

Back to the use of the word ‘I’. Have you ever noticed the possessive sound of that word? I lost a friend recently. It was my loss, my grief. You can't have any.

As if no one can ever feel what you are feeling.

I get sick of people who feel they are unique. I got sick of myself feeling that I was unique. That somehow I had the very hardest life imaginable. That my regrets were somehow especially regrettable, my dark past even more mysterious and ominous. We get lost in the myths we create for ourselves. I know people who have had lives that are more terrible than get described in the most intense novels and movies, and I know people whose lives are worse than that. I understand that, “someone else has it worse” is no comfort to anyone, but when you’ve seen it yourself (I’m not talking even about experiencing it), it makes it more difficult to dole out the same sympathy.

I do feel sympathy, and I am sorry for their loss, but I am also more aware of the greed involved in grief. Death is a difficult subject. A lot of people try to avoid thinking about it. When someone dies there is inevitably a vacuum where they used to be. The rest of us stand around that vacuum thinking that we’ve just lost something. But we never had it. Not in the abstract legal sense like your home or your person. We had it in the fleeting, temporal sense like the water flowing down a rushing river can be said to be water rushing down a river. Sure it is, right now, but in moments it is vapor, or water pooling into a pond, or water cascading down a mountain. Your house is yours because you paid for it (hopefully). Your person is yours because of your inaliable legal rights granted upon birth in this country (Locke did specify Life, Liberty, and property, but Limb was included in his discussion in the second Treatise). The more temporal loss is healed by memories and such. The more abstract is healed by replacing the object lost.

So we lose people. I lost him. But some people do both. They lose him, and they lose him. They lose the temporal, fleeting ownership and the abstract ownership. The former is constructed of interactions and communication, the latter of a kind of objectification. The person lost becomes less than a person to someone who held onto them as property. They are then like the house, owned but not respected, mourned until replaced by something else to mourn about.

What I'm trying to say is this: There is always an element of ownership in our relationships with other people. It doesn't have to be objectifying ownership. Death makes us come face to face with how we own people. I think Paul Varjak put it best in Breakfast at Tiffany's:

You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.