Standard Christian Condolences

Death, I have discovered, makes me violently angry.

It isn't that the death itself makes me angry, although often times this is so. Certainly I am still particularly livid about the death of my twenty-one-year-old brother, and, despite the fact that she was in her 70s at the time, I'm pretty pissed off that my paternal grandmother died. I think if she'd been around when I was in high school, a lot of things would have gone differently for myself and my family. But death is death is death and what are you gonna do? Death is like that game they play in The Secret Garden where they spin you around in circles with a blindfold on and then you have to grope around the designated area until you find someone, at which point you have to feel their face and guess who it is. In this analogy, ladies and gentlemen, the part of the blindfolded person will be played by Death.

No, what makes me really furious about death is people's responses to it.

And I know, I get it, everybody deals with death differently. I know that better than most, certainly, because my mother always wanted to talk about it with me and all I wanted was to run yelling from the room any time she brought the subject up. Don't worry; I am no longer living inside an emotional fall-out shelter.

"Incoming emotions! Incoming! Hit the deck! Take cover! Save yourselves!"

I bring this up mostly because my step-cousin has, for the past couple of weeks now, been constantly updating Twitter and occasionally Facebook with posts about two deaths at her high school. My step-cousin, who lives in the Bible Belt. Who is very strongly entrenched in a local religious community.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

But when she makes these posts, there is a massive outpouring of responses from this religious community with things that say that God has a plan and have faith in God and blah blah blah Jesus is the only path to Salvation, so make sure that while you're trying to figure out this senseless death of a teenager, you sing some new poppy Christian music and hold your hands in the air to show you're really feeling the fucking Holy Spirit.

Because let me fucking tell you, there is very little more infuriating to me than someone's response to death being that it is God's fucking plan. God works in mysterious fucking ways. God will see you through this tough fucking time. FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

And, I swear, if you tell me you're praying for me and my family during this difficult time, I will punch you in the motherfucking face.

As you can see, I feel strongly about this subject.

This is probably not universally true*, but I'm gonna take a wild guess and say that if you respond to the news of death with something about God's plan and your prayers for that family, you have never actually experienced what it's like to lose someone who has not lived a long, full life.

And when I say "lose someone" I mean that someone who is in your immediate family or very intimate with you -- a parent before they were old enough to be a grandparent, a brother, a sister, a child, a best friend, a lover, in some cases a grandchild or a niece or nephew or cousin (although you have to be really fucking close to that niece or nephew or grandchild or cousin to qualify) -- perished. Died. Shuffled off the mortal fucking coil.

(I'm saying fuck a lot in this post. This is uncommon for me.)

Because when you actually get bitchslapped in the face by that kind of death, you suddenly realize how completely useless and inadequate all forms of consolation are. There is no consolation for that kind of loss. There will never be a consolation for that kind of loss.

"I'm so sorry your teenaged son just committed suicide. God has a plan. I'm praying for you."

HOW. FUCKING. PRESUMPTUOUS.

I say this, mind you, as a Christian myself. I don't believe in organized religion in general, but I do believe in God. I believe in Jesus. I do, in fact, think that God has a plan and sometimes I do pray for people (but only ever things like 'keep them safe' or 'help them through this' and I would never ever tell them that).

But you don't know how that person's feeling about God or a plan or anything in that moment and how dare  you make yourself feel better by shoving your own puny sense of stability and order in the universe in their face.

I don't even feel that I can properly articulate how absolutely wrong that is.

And maybe that's just me. I do notice that because of my own particular experiences with death and trauma, I have a tendency to feel almost an ownership, a possessiveness towards the traumatic events themselves.

But I do think that it is impossible to truly understand what it's like to lose someone that close to you until you've lost them. And I think people whose lives have been more or less trauma-free cannot, to a certain extent, truly empathize with the utter chaos or complete devastation of trauma.

Sure, acting-wise, we can say, "If you have killed a mosquito, you know what it is to be a killer." And to some extent that's true. A fucked-up life is not a prerequisite to being a great actor. But I think some life experiences are almost like very exclusive clubs. I am a member of several such clubs. And I am very elitist.

I do want to say that Standard Christian Condolences are not my only death-related pet peeves, just, I think, probably the ones I hate the most.

"You'll see them again in Heaven. They're in a better place."

Fuck you. I want to see them now and I want them to be here in this shitty place with me.

No, just about every response to death bothers me. People who pretend it's effecting them more than it actually is for attention (because, in my experience, the people really suffering tend to be quiet about the pain to most of the world) or some kind of award that says 'Guys, I'm Hurting The Most!' (people who are experiencing their first peripheral brush with death tend to do this -- they play the role of the grieving like it's a game). People who tell me they're sorry for my loss. People who send me 'positive vibes'. INTERNET HUGS. THEY ARE AWFUL.

One of the absolute worst is when people find out you've experienced something like, say, your big brother dying, and their response is to say something along the lines of, "I'm sorry. My best friend's dad died a couple years ago."

THAT IS NOT THE SAME, DUMBASS.

And while I do think there is a certain club-like something to this kind of loss, that does not give anyone the right to say, "Oh, you just got your membership card? Here's my membership card!"

I would never ever tell someone whose brother just died, "Oh, I'm sorry. My brother died too."

I'd bring it into the conversation eventually, but I'd do it to make it about the person feeling the pain and not about me. In that moment, the point of bringing up my own loss would be to let them know that I understand what it feels like and that they're welcome to talk to me about it if they need someone who knows.

Because nobody knows. Nobody fucking knows.

But you know what I think is bothering me the most about this outpouring of messages of love and support and God-plan for these two dead kids in this high school, regardless of how disingenuous or ignorant these responses are?

When my big brother died, there was practically none of it.

And that makes me want to gut the entire fucking world in a hysterical rage.



* I do recognize that there are people in the world who, when faced with death of that magnitude, hold closer to their religious and/or spiritual beliefs and are not shaken and do not question. They stare at the urn with the ashes of their dead loved one and they think, "This is God's plan. God is great. I am blessed." And good for them. I mean, seriously, it must be an amazingly reassuring feeling. Personally, when I'm confronted by this kind of loss, my response tends to be three-fold: 1) "FUCK YOU, GOD!", 2) "GOD, WHAT THE FUCK?! THIS IS BULLSHIT!", and 3) "ARE YOU EVEN UP THERE?!" I don't usually get back around to the "maybe this is God's plan" idea until much, much later in my grieving process.