Mourn The Living, For They Are The Walking Dead

Claire Frick died today.

You probably don't know who she is.  I never even knew her, even.  I vaguely knew her brother from German class* in  high school, but that's about it.

Cancer's a funny thing.  It's a go-to illness for TV shows that want to add drama (Desperate Housewives, Buffy, probably a bunch I don't watch), so that you would think we would almost be desensitized to it, but it is fact in fiction that so many people get cancer that everyone knows someone who has had it.  There are cancer memoirs and Relay for Life, and people born in July like me always feel awkward when talking about our horoscope.  There is even Seth Rogan's cancer comedy, "50/50," which was an okay movie even though the main character was supposed to be some kind of everyman and thus had no personality, and the movie did a poor job of communicating how ill he was and therefore there was no real sense that he could possibly die.  Though I seem to be the only one of my friends unmoved by that movie.

Why should the death of a stranger affect me more than that of a fictional character?  Neither exist in my life as more than stories.  Yet if I read Claire's story right (the pictures alone will do that), she was not that insipid smiling sick child that the movies are so fond of (The Day After Tomorrow comes to mind).  She had her art, and she had her family, and she was determined to live life even while she was sick, and eventually dying.  I'm sure she had her pissed off and depressed moments that didn't make it into the article, but she got over it.  She was a real person, both in a literal sense and in a storied sense - her story becomes real to the audience, who can then imagine themselves in her place, paradoxically, more easily than with the everyman.

What would I do if I was diagnosed with a fatal cancer?

I would probably write about it.  And make myself some cool hats.

Death's a funny thing. People react in so many different ways.  I do a literary analysis of it.  And compulsively listen to Frank Turner's "Long Live The Queen"  (You'll live to dance another day/You'll just have to dance for the two of us.  Fuck, that song's even about cancer too, isn't it?).

We don't think about death.  Which is funny because in my Psychology of Religion class, I learned that there are some theories (Terror Management Theory) that claim that all human actions are motivated by the awareness of our own death. 
We are going to die ->
Luckily, there is an afterlife ->
Except someone else has a different view of said afterlife, creating a paradox - they can't both be right ->  so, in order to assert our view as the "right" one, we kill everyone else who believes differently.

Or:

We are going to die ->
We create babies or art or contribute to society in some way so that some influence of ourselves remains after we die, as a sort of spiritual immortality.

But short of going out and killing people, how do we live with mortality salience (awareness of our own death)?  It's better than dying.  But then what's the point of living if you know it's going to kill you?  Is art really enough?

I think it's time to move on to "One Foot Before The Other."  Not that it helps.  Except it does.

We're here right now and I guess that has to be enough.

I've taken up rock climbing, and usually can't make it to the top.  It's more than the fact that I feel like my wrists are about to give out; I don't have the mental discipline, the sheer willpower to keep myself going.  I made it to the top today (not for the first time, though that would have made it more dramatic).  Just a few feet from the top, and I almost gave up because it was too hard.  But harder than fighting cancer?  She pushed herself through that.  I can push myself through this.

Cheesy, I know, but that's what I got.

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*You have to understand that German is not like other subjects.  Maybe it is just the fact that we were the same group of 20 people for four years (and I went to a big school, so that didn't happen anywhere else), but there was a pretty strong group bond - almost like a family.  So when I say her brother was in my German class, I mean that I wasn't exactly friends with him, but he was more than just some random kid who went to my same school.

A Senseless, Tragic Accident

http://www.startribune.com/local/south/118025164.html

I knew that kid.

And now he's dead.

I found out over a Facebook message, of all things.  His mother must have sent out a message to all of his Facebook friends, a brief, generic message telling that he died in a car crash.  A freaking car crash.  In fiction, a car crash is a euphemism for "killed by plot."  You forget that since it is used as a generic cause of death, that it really does happen a lot to people.  Sometimes people you know. 

I'm sure there's a plot in here somewhere, though.  I met him in high school.  In a film club that a mutual friend had started, and even though I had no particular interest in film, he needed a certain number of people to keep the club going, I liked the people there, and I had no better way to spend a Friday afternoon.

I think we first started talking when I was reading Stephan King's Dark Tower series.  (Of course everything comes down to books in my life.) He thought they were the best thing ever.  I thought they were good, but kind of a mindscrew.  I gave him a copy of King's Insomnia for his seventeenth birthday. 

And my senior year of high school, his junior year, I was not so dense as to miss the fact that he sort of indirectly asked me to prom.  But I was dumb enough to accept.  I brought my best female friend along, because it wasn't like a date or anything, I didn't like him that way...and I think I forgot to make that quite clear.  But hey, prom is an important plot point in any high school drama, and I was intrigued by the image of doing something so normal as going to plot with a boy (and a girl).  I wore a dress that night for the first time in about 12 years.  And even though I had probably one of the sweetest, most gentlemanly prom-boys (not a date) ever, I realized that night that I would never be able to like him as he (might have) liked me.  He was a nice boy, but he was still a boy, with a boy's sense of humor and a boy's taste in literature, and we didn't really have much in common anyway.  Nothing about him even struck me as particularly interesting, though admittedly I was wary of getting too close to him.  But his friends seemed to like him, and when I say he was nice, I'm not just searching for a generic, positive adjective; he really was one of those people that really tried to be polite and never really acted like a jerk.

So then I graduated, and we went on with our respective lives.  I thought of him only occasionally, mostly as a stepping-stone in my coming out story.  There was a squirmy feeling of unresolved issues, that I never really told him I didn't like him back, because I was not quite sure that he really liked me as such.  And going along with that, that I never came out with him.  That I more or less went to prom with him under false pretenses.  I felt that I had used him.  But such is life, and you move on until the pain is nearly forgotten, and you never see these people again, except perhaps at a reunion, or by mystical accident.

But not even that will happen.  I'll never be able to explain any of this to him.  That brings me no relief.  The only relieved feelings I have that I might feel guilty about are because I am in Germany and don't have to feel obligated to go to the funeral, to mingle with his relatives, and his friends who I vaguely knew in high school.  People who feel a greater absence for his loss than I do. 

It's strange.  When someone close to you dies, you go through the grieving process, that's perfectly understandable.  But when someone dies who wasn't particularly close to you but you knew beyond merely a face and a name, you don't know how you're supposed to feel.  Or you feel guilty because you aren't sad enough.  There's just shock, and the guilty relief at surviving this round, but you're still shaken by how close it was.  And of course life/death doesn't work like that, but emotions don't know that.

Plot:  A lesbian goes to prom with a boy who dies two years later.  What a stupid story.  I've put up with my Author's inanity thus far, but he really has a lot to answer for now.