My recent experiences as an undertaker have strained what I thought I was capable of handling on a psychological level. Of course, carrying 300+ lbs corpses are a physical challenge of their own, but we won’t get into that. Tricks of the trade and all.
Fairly soon into my work I realised I would have to process trauma, difficult experiences, and nightmarish encounters with death fairly quickly. The alternative, at least as I saw it, was spiralling into a version of nihilism characterised by feelings of despair. Despite my love of goth fashion, I don’t actually want to bear a boulder of depression on my shoulders at all times.
To my mind, there was no option of storing certain moments away so as to be dealt with weeks, months, or even days later.
The only thing left to do was figure out a means of processing them on the spot or soon after.
Jobs like mine are a recipe for becoming a callous, embittered individual. Working with death and people whose lives are are Hell-on-Earth doesn’t just make the world feel darker, but it hammers in that reality.
On mornings after particularly difficult calls, it was only after I talked or processed the experience with either a journal or a friend, that I could find myself emotionally available to other facets of my life. If I left it unwritten or unsaid, my responses—even thoughts—remained curt and cynical.
The experience became a wall between myself and a more vibrant part of my being.
If left alone, these experiences obliterated my ability to access the friendly, more loving parts of my personality which were previously so readily available.
Although my worldview can be macabre at times, with it comes an equal passion and love for creating order out of it.
That is why I began to develop an art.
The Art of Suffering
There’s an art to everything we do. How we communicate. How we make use of our time. But there’s also an art to suffering. This means how we perform best under pressure, and just what kind of person we become when our world feels like it’s slipping through our fingers.
Consciously or not, we’ve all been developing this art throughout our lives. But the difference between a practicing artist and an amateur is simply having an awareness of it.
Of course, the ripe time to master our art is exactly in the moments when we’re tempted to scream, cry, shut-off, or otherwise lose our shit completely. Although there are times for this, and it may even feel ‘right’ to process our emotions this way, most of the time it only adds to the turmoil. The stress of the situation becomes compounded by our violent handling of it.
You may be thinking, “but isn’t screaming and/or crying in the moment a healthy recognition of the horror we’re experiencing?” I will challenge that shortly.
Many people don’t think about this when the moment arises, but we have a great deal of control over what version of us shows up in a catastrophe. This includes depression, panic attacks, and fits of mania. We can build endurance with more manageable difficulties, so we can perform at our best when the big shakes inevitably come.
This endurance can be built to a point where one doesn’t need to scream or cry in the moment, though one may be at the point in their art.
‘Manageable difficulties’ include frustrating moments with partners, urges to lash out, minor inconveniences, and the general challenges of living which ‘get in the way’ of happiness.
Let’s get back to that whole screaming and crying part.
Releasing Emotion
I do, in fact, cry. Try not to faint. I weep after particularly difficult days. The grief can be infectious. Once, as soon as I was out of earshot of the family I had just helped, I fell into a panic attack, and had to park the vehicle I was driving so as to not cause an accident.
More and more, these forms of release are becoming almost ‘tidy’. Whereas before I was blindsided by them, now I can feel them coming on. I know when I need to express them in a bodily way. Oftentimes, this lasts for just a few minutes alone, and having had opportunities to sort out my thoughts prior, the crescendo of emotions typically signifies the end of that experience haunting me.
Though the memories remain, I know how I feel about them, and that knowledge is power over them.
Even if these experiences change me fundamentally as a person, simply by being aware of those changes, I know I am not damaged … only different. This is how the suffering becomes cohesive with life rather than quarrelsome. It becomes crafted. Consciously incorporated.
Needless Misery and Caramel Sauce
There is also the question of what constitutes ‘suffering’. Although daily challenges are inevitable, most of the time, the psychological strain we feel from minor inconveniences need not be there to begin with. Mindfulness practices such as meditation, or frequent exercise, can help turn scruples into dust on our shoulders we wipe off at a moment’s notice.
This functions like any other skill. It needs practice.
To illustrate it in a more pragmatic way … have you ever been in line at a coffee shop and marvelled at the frustration the customer in front of you experienced with a botched order, or simple interaction gone slightly awry?
“Hell, Karen, it’s just caramel sauce. It’s not the end of the world that they’re out of it.”
To you, the shortage of caramel sauce was nothing, and not just because it wasn’t your preference. If it was, you would have grinned and said, “Oh, that’s all right,” and picked another sweetener. But to Karen, that was a very real form of suffering, even if it was minor. The frustration mattered. That was her morning ruined. That was the first inconvenience in a long line of inconveniences that would turn into another one of her lamented days.
The problem, as you can guess, is that we all have our ‘caramel sauce’. Okay … this is not coming out how I envisioned, but you get the picture. We all have those things which needlessly ruin our moods, and ultimately, waste perfectly decent days.
We can’t afford to be bias about this. Deep down, we know which little things shouldn’t be given the time of day.
So why does this matter? Well, our days are numbered. Solving the problem of dealing with misery swiftly is one of the most frequent emergencies we should be constantly attending to.
If we are to truly take advantage of our mortality, it is imperative that we hone down on these inconveniences and learn to be at peace with them. This practice of eliminating the emotional toll of inconveniences, I argue, will build our ability to handle greater trials.
Most needless suffering arises from the simple fact that we don’t wake up ready for life to present unexpected challenges.
Even if these challenges are inner, psychological, and not from a physical environment. But the pattern is clear and observable, and we can build a skill in being ready to present our strongest self at a moment’s notice.
Sometimes it feels like, in times of immense pain, there are multiple personalities fighting to take over. Instincts to lose control, be vulnerable, stoic, etc., But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. What it comes down to is just exactly which modus operandi one prefers to perfect when things go sideways.
We alone possess the remedy for chaos. We alone are the ones holding the brush when blood comes onto the canvas.
