HEALTH PLUS:Plane crashes bring home to us just how precious life is and how quickly we can lose loved ones, writes MARIE MURRAY
A PLANE CRASH with fatalities alerts us to how swiftly, how completely, how irreparably life may change in a moment and be changed forever. It reminds us how the unforeseen can happen.
It dents our confidence in the controllability, the predictability and the security of tomorrow, if tomorrow can be changed in an instance.
It alerts us to how distinctive and how valuable is each life, how unique, how precious, how exceptional, how irreplaceable are those who we love. It makes us aware of how much they fill our lives in ways that make our lives incomplete by their death.
A plane crash where life is lost reminds us that the concerns of today are irrelevant compared to what sudden, unexpected and tragic death brings to those who grieve and the mourning that follows. It silhouettes what is genuinely important.
If we do not know anyone personally who is killed, it engenders a guilty relief that we have been spared what others must suffer. It makes us acutely aware of those who were not so lucky this time.
It makes us think about what confronts wives, husbands, partners, relations, parents and children if any is lost to the other.
A plane crash has a mythological quality. Like an ancient blight, it falls from the sky. It shadows and darkens the lives of everyone connected to all the passengers and crew on board.
Anxious time passes before the worst is confirmed, before casualties are counted and verified, before the black box is sought to explain that which is now irrelevant to the dead. Hope is erased.
A new way of living begins for those who have lost someone in the crash. Life is changed, utterly and forever.
Unexpected disaster unearths our deepest selves in coping with the tragic, the unforeseen and with the rupture of all that was expected to continue.
Unexpected disastrous death alerts us to the cruel, arbitrary, random, incomprehensible, injustice visited upon those who it strikes.
Why should this person who I love be on that plane, making that journey at that time? What statistical chance is there that I should lose someone I love in this disaster?
Why, when so many flights leave so many airports, in so many minutes, of so many hours of each day, should the person I love be on the one plane that crashes?
Why should that person die and I have my life condemned by this tragedy?
It is especially poignant when the lives lost are those of young people. Young life lost has resonance for us all. Children should not be taken from their parents.
Parents should not have to undergo what is the most painful of human experiences: that of outliving their own child. It is untimely, aberrant and unjust.
It is filled with immensities of pain that can only be understood by those who have experienced it. It cannot be imagined.
Young people have their lives ahead of them. They should not be foreclosed. Their journey is not complete. The death of young people offends all that is meant to happen. What is untimely is unfair.
Children should not die before their parents. Parents should never have to stand at the grave of their children. It is not right. It immobilises all who experience or witness that grief.
Parents should not die until they have had a chance to see their children into established adulthood and beyond, in the next appropriate, timely cycle of life.
Despite medications for physical and mental pain relief, grief is its own process and it is not always wise to address it exclusively in a pharmacological way.
In therapy, often the way through grief is simply to go through it, entering into it, experiencing it, describing it, talking about the person who has died, articulating every emotion, providing every detail of what happened and all that went before and after that event.
People often need to talk about death, about who died, how, when, where and why, to hear themselves narrate the life of the person who died.
The mysteries of life and death remain beyond us so that grief requires our energy, our attention, our engagement with it and time for its process.
In the presence of grief it helps if we show concern for each other when each of us encounters it as we inevitably do, at some time, in some form, in the loss of someone we love.
Clinical psychologist and author Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in University College Dublin, mmurray@irishtimes.com