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Two people that I know slightly made separate posts to a message board. Both are dealing with the loss of family members. Both comment that other people are weirded out by this loss, to the point where the posters are blamed for the negative emotions that others feel when they accidentally stumble on the situation. A third person commented that there should be some social convention to handle this. Well, there is. Or at least was. When one asks an innocent question that results in getting an answer one doesn’t want to hear ("So, how’s your brother?" "He died horribly last week in a fiery car crash."), the reply should be, "I didn’t know that. I’m sorry to hear it." More articulate people than I may wish to and be capable of adding a few words of their own, appropriate to the situation. They key to this, of course, is getting an answer one doesn’t want to hear. We tend to use acquaintances as shadows to validate our own self-esteem (which, as someone pointed out to me recently, has nothing to do with one’s sense of one’s own worth) and as emotional props for ourselves. When we ask, "How are you?", we don’t really to know; we want to hear, "Just fine; tell about your problems to that I can sympathize with you". Even when we can tolerate grief in another, we don’t really know how to deal with it. This is because no one really knew how to deal with it, as grief can have all sorts of genuinely weird manifestations. It can involve hysterical crying, or hysterical laughter, or both on alternate days. Over centuries, we developed a set of social conventions whereby people could signal, "I grieve!" and others could signal back, "We see and respect that". Of course, we threw all these away a few decades ago, as they were mere hypocritical social conventions, and people should be open and honest. So now we have people openly and honestly saying, "Oh, I didn’t go to her husband’s wake; wakes squick me" and "Boy, it really brought me down when he told me that his sister died in childbirth". The next time someone tells you of a tragedy, be a hypocrite. Act like you care, like your day hasn’t been ruined. Act like a human being. John "Akatsukami" Braue Saturday, December 07, 2002 |
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