You Can’t Make Dead People Happy!

Here we are, it’s September. I’m staring down the barrel of my sister’s death anniversary (also known as my birthday) next month. It will be eleven years. Eleven entire years without her humor, her guidance, her bossiness, her making me double over with laughter, unable to breathe; eleven years without knowing her opinions.

We had what we called “Monday Morning Check-in” for years. One of us would call the other on Monday morning and we would talk, sometimes for 2 hours or more, about whatever subject we stumbled upon. Through these talks, and all the other conversations we would have, I learned her feelings and her stance on so many subjects. I knew her incredibly well.

As the years have gone by without her, I have wondered endlessly what she would think of my various life choices, or how I was parenting, or the state of the world today. What would she have thought of Covid? Or current-day politics? Or the paths of each of her 4 children? When she was alive I wouldn’t even get a haircut without discussing my thoughts about it with her first, so you can imagine how much her opinions meant to me.

The problem I encountered has been that as I have tried to imagine how she would feel about my various choices or circumstances, time kept moving us further and further from our last conversation. Time moves on. The value I place on her opinions hasn’t changed. It has taken me a lot of time to work through the feeling that I was perpetually disappointing her.

I would make a decision, think through how she would react, and way too often I would decide that she would have disagreed. At one point I made a parenting decision about my 20 year old and second guessed myself. I thought, “No, she would have handled that differently.”

Suddenly I stopped myself. How did I know this? My sister, unfortunately, never had the chance to parent any of her children past the age of 15. How was I at all qualified to be deciding how she would make parenting decisions about a 20 year old? The answer, which took me so long to decide, came to me in a moment of anger. Frustrated with “her” and my surmising of “her opinions” of me, I found myself muttering to myself. “Ugh! You just can’t made dead people happy!”

I started repeating that to myself. “You can’t make dead people happy.”

It started to become my mantra, and my philosophy about how to process those feelings of endless wondering what my loved ones would think of me if they there still living. I mention my sister here because I was always seeking her input, but I have also spent a lot of time trying to decide what my dad would think of me as well. I want to make them happy, I want to make them proud of me. But, as dead people, they offer literally no input into my current life choices. (How rude!)

After the “you can’t made dead people happy” epiphany, I started to make up rules around the philosophy, because of course I did. I decided that it feels good when I pat myself on the back and imagine that my dad or my sister are pound of me. I don’t want to remove those feelings from my mind. However, when I imagine one or the other of them criticizing me, I now think “That’s not them. They are not judging my choices from beyond the grave.” I no longer accept criticism formulated in my own brain, as a representation of how they would have thought. I don’t think that’s fair to them (or to me).

You might ask (because I know I’ve asked myself) what about those hot-button issues they held such strong beliefs about? Can’t I at least believe that they would be critical of me for not honoring those strongly held beliefs? The answer, I’ve decided, is no. Accepting that they would be critical of me based on a strongly held belief they had 11 or 14 years ago, requires believing that if they were still alive, they would not have changed or evolved at all in the ensuing years. In which direction would they evolve? I have no idea. But I know they both were very intelligent people who would learn new information or have new experiences, and change their opinions as they deemed necessary based on that new knowledge.

I can’t, in good conscience, decide what they would think. And I most certainly cannot decide that they would be critical of me, one of the people they both loved most in the world.

So, to boil it down: I don’t care if this makes sense or not, but I decide on a regular basis that my sister and my dad are proud of me. I have also decided that any criticism I feel could be coming from them is not valid. I’m not qualified to speak for her or him. I also regularly remind myself of this philosophy by using the phrase, “You can’t make dead people happy!”

If I have gotten this all wrong, and I am able to see them again someday, I will accept any and all of their criticism at that time, all at once. But for now, I only accept loving support from “them”.

P.S. They both absolutely love this blog post!