This isn't about politics, it's about common human decency and one individual's utter lack of it.
There is a certain popular political pundit, one who shall remain nameless, that has a new book out. In that book she makes some callous comments that were no doubt meant only to inflame, injure, and insult:
"These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis. I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' death so much." [Emphasis mine.}
"These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks only happened to them."
"They believed the entire country was required to marinate in their exquisite personal agony. Apparently, denouncing Bush was an important part of their closure process."
If you want to know just how morally reprehensible each and every one of these statements is, just substitute in John Walsh. Is there ever a moment in time when John Walsh doesn't rub the death of his son, Adam, in somebody else's face? It seems to me that he goes out of his way to remind everybody about it and that he wants the entire world to share in his exquisite agony. I mean, really, when is he just going to get over it?
Do you see what I mean? Can you even begin to comprehend the point I am desperately trying to make?
The man that John Walsh was died the moment his son Adam did, an entirely new man was born from the ravages of the agonizing and completely unsharable grief that consumed him. Just as the man I once was died the very moment my wife did. A new one, with a vastly different world view, personality, and understanding of the true "meaning of life" has been forming in the three years since the doctor said to me, "I'm sorry...she's dead," and I turned and literally collapsed into my father's arms. I don't know what happened after that. I think I screamed. I know cried. Great, heaving convulsions wracked my body while, in my soul, there was nothing but pain.
That pain is still very much there, even though three years have almost passed. The regret, the resentment, the torment of wondering what I could have done differently to save my wife from the ravages of alcoholism, it's all there. It will never go away. It has become one of the defining moments of my life. Right up there with the birth of my son, who is also suffering in his own private little hell. One that is removed from mine, because it is his and his alone. After watching the American version of the film Dark Water, my son cried for twenty minutes. He turned to me at one point and sobbed, "I'm NEVER going to see my mommy again, not until I'm DEAD!" It was a chilling statement to hear for an eleven year old boy. My greatest fear is that he will try and hurt himself, just so he can see his mother again. I was quick to voice that fear, telling him that, if he ever did intentionally hurt himself, he wouldn't see his mother. That there were rules to life we must follow. Those rules, I have found, have nothing whatsoever to do with truth, justice, and the pursuit of happiness.
He will also carry the pain of Rosie's death in him for the rest of his life. It is every bit as defining to him as a person as it is to me. Our reactions are as different as our personalities. He has found Faith, I have have lost it. Rosie is still an integral part of his life, and always will be. For me, I am learning to live with only one hand, one leg, one eye, one ear. My other half has been severed and the spiritual therapy has only just begun.
But we live in a disposable society. My wife had not been dead for even one week when an acquaintance approached me and asked, "So, you think you'll ever get married again?" She hadn't even been dead for six months when people started asking me when I planned to start dating again. Un-frakking-believable. But, as I said, we live in a disposable society. This is why I am reluctant to talk about it, even here, on this blog. Because a part of me fully expects to hear, or see reflected in certain comments, "Dude, when the hell are you just going to get over it."
The answer is, never. It isn't something you "get over," it is something you learn to live with. It will saturate every aspect of my life until I die. Learning to live with the death of a loved one isn't easy, for anyone.
Which is something this political pundit, one who, as far as I can tell, has never been married or mothered a child, seems emotionally incapable of understanding, much less relating to. Some day she might come to understand the soul shattering torment that is the death of a loved one. When that time does come, no matter how vile her statements of the past may have been, my heart will go out to her. Because I know and understand that pain all too well. I wouldn't wish it on anyone, not even her.
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