They are both dead now. My parents who brought me into this world have now left it. For me, this is not an occasion for sadness, grief, or relief. Instead, it’s an opportunity to reflect and embrace mortality and finitude. Like my mother, Augustine’s mother, Monica, prayed for her son ceaselessly. At her death, he struggled not to show any signs of grief. His Confessions are a conversation with God, and he remembers that crushed with grief, “in a turmoil of mind I asked you continually, as best I could, to heal my pain. You did not do so” (mente turbata rogabam te, ut poteram, quo sanares dolorem meum, nec faciebas).

Grief is a terrifying and destructive thing. Were we to genuinely feel it, it would pull us down into darkness and oblivion. Therefore, we do not. It is a luxury we cannot afford, a luxury cheapened by social norms and custom, usually enforced with disapprobation at its absence or at its extreme. This is fortunate. It holds us together. If we felt the grief due to us, from the losses great and small, the world would simply stop. Our customs, our norms, our conveniences hold it off, keeping it at the margins. Phillip Larkin describes that margin where death and grief live in Aubade.

And so, it stays just on the edge of vision,  
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill  
That slows each impulse down to indecision.  
Most things may never happen: this one will,  
And realization of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without  
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave  
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

You’re next. How you feel about that doesn’t matter. We. Are. Next.