The crash of two news helicopters in Phoenix and the recent death of my great aunt (or rather my search for a sympathy card to send my great uncle) got me to thinking about the way we (Americans) deal with death.  Not the religious aspect, which I as a atheist/agnostic am not at all qualified to talk about, not the personal private aspect, but the public cultural aspect.  

The coverage of the news helicopter crash included memorials to the four news people (a pilot and a photographer in each) who died, and I was struck by how special all four people were described as being.  Then I realized that I've never heard a dead person memorialized on television as ordinary.  They're never pleasant but unremarkable people, who will be missed by their friends and family.  They're always "the most ____"  "the best ___"  "at the top of their field."  Would their colleagues miss them any less if they were average?  Is this an expansion of the idea that you should never speak ill of the dead, whereby we now can only talk about them in shining terms?  Or is it that it's easier to make them special in distant ways when called to memorialize friends on camera?  Would they break down if they had to talk about them as they really were - just guys doing their job, guys they'd worked with for years, who they miss very much?  (Though some of the reporters, even at other stations, seemed pretty close to tears as it was.  The Phoenix TV news community must be fairly close knit, especially the helicopter news people who apparently share a hanger area.)

I'm not saying that these particular people weren't special; for all I know, they really were some of the greatest helicopter newsmen to have lived.  I'm merely musing on the fact that we seem to need people to be objectively special in order to publicly admit that they were special to us.  Can't we admit to caring about and mourning the ordinary?  Because, let's face it, most of us are pretty ordinary.  We will never be best selling novelists, decorated for heroism in the line of duty or otherwise, the person who finds the cure for cancer, an olympic gold medalist, a foster parent who miraculously turns around the lives of the children they taken in, inventor of the next big thing, or even the smartest guy at the office.  Does that mean no one should mourn us?  Or worse, that when people do, they turn us into some paragon we never were?

And what about the people who die who we're supposed to mourn because society expects it of us?  Why is it easier to lie, in small or large ways, than to admit that it doesn't matter (or even, depending on the situation, that we're glad they're dead)?  Take my family (please).  Beyond my parents, my family ranges from acquaintances to people I tolerate (because they're important to people I do care for, for societal reasons, because I feel sorry for them?) to people I despise and avoid.  My family, like many, is also quite messed up.  (Yes, this is going somewhere.)

My grandmother and her siblings were physically and emotionally abuse by their drunken lout of a father, who frequently spent grocery money on booze and who sounds like a truly despicable person.  Yet, every couple of years they get together as a family, not to spit on his grave, not to celebrate their long-suffering and apparently nice mother, but to celebrate him.  They tell lies about their childhoods, either editing the bad parts out or romanticizing them, turning the hell they grew up in into some kind of twisted Norman Rockwell painting.  Can't they just admit he was a horrible man and find some other reason to get together?  Wouldn't that be honest and healing?  Hell, they could even mourn him for whatever decency he had while still admitting he was mostly a prize asshole.  But no, we can't be honest about the dead.

Even the dead we barely knew, like my great aunt.  I spent time with her in the context of family gatherings, but I never really knew her.  I couldn't tell you what she liked, how she spent her time; I barely know what she did for a living.  I am sorry she's dead in the same human sense that I'm sorry those newsmen in Phoenix are dead, but I'm am very relieved that they aren't having a funeral for her.  I've been to other family funerals and always end up feeling guilty that I don't really care - they could be funerals for complete strangers because, so far, they've all been people I haven't really known.  And you simply can't miss people you never knew.

I barely know my great uncle, too.  Still, I felt obligated by society or by the knowledge that she was important to him, to send him a sympathy card.  Finding one that didn't disgust me with it's condescending dreck proved to be difficult.  The less appalling religious ones seemed wrong, even though he is religious, because I am not, and I didn't feel right about sending cards that offer hope I don't personally believe in.  But the non-religious cards were sickly sweet and promised nearly glurgy hope - her memories would comfort him, beauty would comfort him (may I barf now?).  I couldn't even stand the traditional "with our deepest sympathies."  All the cards actually seemed designed for someone who, wasn't grieving, but was willing to pat the poor pathetic grieving person on the head and be falsely sympathetic to them.  Well, I might not have been grieving, but I wasn't willing to do that.  I did finally find a reasonably neutral card that merely hoped that time would help (or words to that effect).  It was the hope part that sold me - that was an honest, real sentiment, or as close as greeting cards get.  It didn't promise anything, it didn't speak from on high or condescend, it hoped.