Grief Rant
As some of you might now from my twitter, two young girls died in a car crash on Saturday. One was a senior at my high school, i didn't know her or her family, but its been tearing me up having to watch the younger kids back at my high school have to deal with this. What follows is something that apparently has been building inside me for a while now and burst forth in a short 20minutes nonstop writing session yesterday after a shower.
If you could PLEASE just read it and give me some feedback that would be fantastic and much appreciated. I really need people removed from the situation to read it and critque it. Thank you so much in advance! =]
So I stood in the shower and this is the thought process that went on:
Body wash, check. *sigh* I cannot imagine what Long Valley is like right now, two more girls. Josie. So sad, so uncomprehendable. A senior too that’s even worse. Kyleigh was just a sophomore. Grief is so fucking weird. It’s actually so self centered. One cries and sobs and mourns their loss, not the other persons. Because what is the point of crying about that, either way, the person got out. AND if you’re religious odds are that you believe the person’s in Heaven or your religions version of it. It’s not about the deceased, it’s about you. It is all about you losing that person to roll your eyes with at the girl whose outfit just screams desperate. It’s about losing that person to look to in Pre-Calc and make the “WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT?!” face at after getting a first glimpse at the test. It’s about you losing that familiar knock on the dorm door and then booming demand you go to dinner with them right that instant, fuck whatever else you’re doing. It’s about losing that person to flop down on the quad with during sunny days and talk nonsense about nothing. It’s about you losing the sight of that smile, the sound of that laugh, the shift in the mattress as they slid out of bed. It’s not about them. The excuse for tears gets made through, “oh what she could have done, we’ll never know.” “what things and place’s he’ll never see.” and the classic “they had so much life ahead of them.” But what if this was all they wanted. What if the real reason they rolled their eyes with you at the girl in that outfit was not because they thought it was ridiculous, but because they wished they could pull it off themselves? What if the reason they gave you that look in Pre-Calc was due to the dread of having to one day actually use this for a career they weren’t sure they even really wanted? What if the reason they demanded the abandoning of homework for food was not because they wanted to spend time with a friend, but because they didn’t want to spend time with themselves, couldn’t spend time with themselves? What if all that nonsense about nothing they talked about was really actually soul bearing stuff they still couldn’t quite find the right words for? What if that smile was fake, the laugh self conscious, and they left bed because they thought you deserved more than them? What if, deep down inside, they wanted nothing more than those tiny moments they shared with friends and family, and the future was something they barely gave a thought too? What if you, oh most selfish griever, are still putting pressure on even after the poor kid’s long gone?
Squelching back to my room I realized just how offensive all of that sounds. As I hurriedly slipped into my pj’s I figured that oh well, if offended it offended. Who gives a fuck if somebody thinks this makes me seriously naïve and stupid, this is what I believe, and I’m entitled to it. Offend away.
But then I opened my newsfeed on facebook, and my thoughts cracked. Literally ever person I was friends with on facebook who was still back at Central High School had a status about Josie. If not a status, then a wall post offering condolences to her best friends. And if not that, they were posting to each other words of love, forgiveness, and putting the past and all the other stupid shit behind them.
I have only been at college for about three months and yet I already feel so much older and look at the kids in high school, even the seniors, as just that; kids. I cannot explain this mental shift in attitude, it just occurred. I think maybe because, they are in a way still kids more so than I am. They do not have to be living on their own, fending almost quite literally for themselves. Forced into the situation of living quite possibly with an utter stranger. Having to force themselves to get up, go to class, do homework or study, go to practice, talk to the person next door or the desk next to yours to make friends. So what it comes down, in the end, is responsibility, they don’t have the same level of responsibility not only with school work but for themselves. They have not had to deal with the responsibility of dealing with the shit the world can absolutely just smother your tired and desperate face in.
At least, until now. Now they have all tasted the bitterness of mortality and choked harsh facts of life that go beyond any talk they’ve ever received from parents, siblings or health classes. They have talked with somebody the day before in the hallway, in class, in the locker room, and the next found out that four days hence they will be visiting her cold body in box, have to watch it get lowered into a ground covered in flowers while they wear their best black clothes.
I myself have tasted this bitterness. Once it was in manner not too dissimilar to theirs; my freshman year a sophomore name Kyleigh died in a car accident the night before the last of school prior to Christmas break. I only knew her in passing from the girls soccer locker room, but it was enough to rattle me. Then about two months later Dawn D’Alessandro died, the mother of one of my close friends. This broke me, ripped a whole dimension into the world I had been leaving and vacuumed out any preconceptions I had about life. I have choked on those harsh facts every so often since sophomore year dealing with my sister and never-ending struggle with anorexia.
Sure, I was younger than all of them were when I first had to deal with anything even slightly like what they are now coping with. And yes despite the year or two year age gap I do now see them as kids compared to myself. But that doesn’t mean I can’t understand what they’re going through, or make me indifferent to it. In fact it’s quite the reverse. It means I can empathize with them a level that no adult who tries to help them probably can. It means that I feel more involved in what has happened, and not because I have in passing friendships with some of the now seniors. Not because I’m from the same high school or same town.
It’s because I would never want anybody else to feel the ache that was tattooed on my consciousness in dealing with Kyleigh or Dawn’s death, and I would not wish upon the most evil of evil people the persistently throbbing worry and love I was scorched with during my sister’s ongoing battle with anorexia.
I wanted to protect them, as a mother would her child, from the all the cruelty this world has to offer.
So it is that I do not think I want to ever have a child. For I would only be dooming them to one day have to suffer, if not through interactions with the other cruelties of the world then from the pain they would have to cope with on the day their mother died.