About 24 hours after father went missing in a boating accident, before he was declared dead, my sisters and I were sent to spend a day with my grandparents. This was their only child. It was two days after his 38th birthday, and they had been fighting with him.
They took us to the house of a friend of theirs who happened to have grandchildren about our ages visiting. My grandmother turned to me and said." be very nice to these girls, their father died about four years ago." To this day, coming up on 30 years ago, it amazes me how completely oblivious the coment was, but I know too that she was just maintaining best she could by putting it out of her mind.
People cope best they can and grieve how they need to. Often it may look to judgmental outsiders as inappropriate. In the end, it ain’t their shoes.
I don’t even find the comment (Why did this have to happen to me?) one that I think I should pass over out of sympathy. The comment seems perfectly appropriate to me. Even touching! (Well, I should say, it seems plausible the comment could have been made in such a context as to be appropriate and even touching.)
The way I’m imagining it went down, the vibe I get is the dude is so in love with his wife, has tied himself in so tightly with her fate, that it can’t help but be that when she is harmed, he is harmed, and to the degree that she is harmed, so also (does he feel) he is harmed to that degree.
Not harmed in the same way–clearly, she died, and he didn’t–but the loss of his wife’s life feels to him, perhaps, just as awful as the prospect of the loss of his own life. So if it actually happens to her, then something terrible has ipso facto happened to him.
When she died, he declared his undying love for her by exclaiming in a way that made it clear just how closely he considered his fate to be bound to hers.
And now I’m thinking about my own wife and starting to get sad, imagining bad possibilities way to much.
I would have thought that the combination of the pathos of the image of my friend’s mother, contrasted with the direct paraphrase adaptation of the fairly heartless wording used by silenius, should have made my intentions perfectly clear.
However, you’re right - indeed nobody ever went bust underestimating the intelligence of the public.
(Here’s what would be funny, though: What if the reason I got the joke immediately was that I have an problem spotting straightforwardness–I always assume everything is sarcastic. Now that would make for a funny skit or something.)
I can’t speak for silenus, but my guess is that he didn’t “bother” to do anything. He had a gut reaction (for lack of a better term)to the words of another’s “gut reaction”. He read a quote and expressed the way those words effected him. I saw his point and said so.
I’m not sure why this is so offensive to you. Maybe his phrasing was a little harsh, but pit worthy? I consider myself to be empathetic above all else and I got what he(silenus) was saying. In the larger scope of the tragedy it’s hardly important, nor is it anyone’s business what his words were in the aftermath, but we don’t know him and didn’t witness it. Because this is an anonymous Internet message board, often times emotional context is lost.
The “blinding whiteness of my own virtue” (pithy phrase, that)aside, yeah, I actually *do * measure my words more than most. That’s not to say that I hold others to that standard, just that, like I said, the man’s words struck me as unexpected.
I hope you appreciate the humor of this comment. After all, if the behavior of a man looking at his wife’s dead body is fair game for criticism on a bulletin board, then certainly that criticism is subject to criticism.
I get you. I was thinking the same thing as I was responding. Well, kind of the same thing. Something about the two being different sides of the same coin and so cancelling each other out.
By the by, Frylock’s post put it in a very different light for me. Not that I needed to be reassured that the man’s words were anything but grief for his lost wife; I simply didn’t think that deeply about it. I think Silenus reacted to words he saw on a page, most likely without giving much thought to the whole situation.
Exactly. And if a calm and detached person posting about something on the Internet can be given the benefit of the doubt over some rubbish he said, certainly some guy who just lost his wife can be given that same benefit. Judge not, etc.
In the words of that insightful student of human nature, James Morrison, “People are strange.” Processing traumatic, grief-causing occurrences is often when their behavior is the strangest. Denial, emotional divorcement from the event, and so on are common. So is suppressing grief. Taking refuge in routine or mindless activity is very common.
My wife lost her parents in a six-months period in her mid-teens, in the early 1960s – first her mother to a cerebral hemorrhage, then her father to suicide (an eerie foreboding of what happened with my own, 20 years later). She bottled up the grief, and to her surviving relatives it seemed as if she didn’t care. In 1989, we took a winter vacation to Florida, and it was driving down I-81 in Pennsylvania that she began talking about a horrific accident she’d seen with her parents while driving down that road with them, many years before, to visit her mother’s family. That segued into her finally being able to grieve for them, talk out her feelings on that trip – 26 years after the events. I’ve got a good dozen stories of odd ways people have dealt with grief in my presence – but that one sums them up. You process grief in the manner and at the time you’re ready to do it.
Most of us are fortunate in that we can grieve without a bazooka-sized microphone being jammed in our faces. I always feel sorry for folks on the news whose grief is made public. No one looks good when they’re bawling in the yard, screaming at the top of their lungs.
Last weekend, a young man down here died when his car plunged off the highway and into a canal. His grief-shricken mother was shown on the news screaming: “I WANT JUSTICE FOR MY SON! I WANT JUSTICE FOR MY SON!” A non-compassionate heart would call this woman an idiot for thinking her son had been a victim of “injustice” rather than simply poor driving. But you have to ask yourself: What in the hell would I have said if I had been her? I probably would have said something even more ridiculous.
My first Pitting. Well, the first one directly about something I said.
To tell the truth, I didn’t really put much thought into the post, nor did I have much of an emotional response to the man’s plight. Words on a screen about someone I don’t know. But I found his words odd. Could I have phrased my post better? Definitely. Would it have been better all around if I had just kept my mouth shut? Definitely again. Am I going to lose any sleep over this? No. Why? Because the people who are analyzing me and speculating as to my degree of emotional involvement and empathy, based on the words they read on a message board, without knowing me at all, are just as judgmental as I was.
I take my pitting with what I hope is a fitting dignity.
Why should he have empathy for the man? He doesn’t even know him. The original thread was the standard, “Oh, let me post about some tragedy that I read about in the world and feel morally superior because I’m outraged on behalf of the victims” pit thread.
Well, if the guy has started singing “Ding dong the witch is dead!” while doing a happy little dance, I think a certain amount of judgmentalism might be appropriate. That said, I agree that the man’s response to his wife’s death was a normal, understandable reaction, and that silenus’s criticism was misplaced. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “witless, casual judgmentalism,” though.
I was not aware that was a requirement for empathy.
It is just possible that our knowledge of the comment and its context is incomplete. Certainly we do not have enough information to condemn the poor guy.
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