We are all going to die. It would be great if all of us got to die fulfilling a last wish, instead of say hooked up to a machine, knocked unconscious by pain killers until our systems shut down.
This story is melancholy because it is both tragic that someone had to die at a young age, but also uplifting because he got this one moment with his hero. And we are also reminded that ordinary people can have an extraordinary affect on others - in this case both the kid and the Santa.
Don’t ever pick up a Readers Digest. They always a half dozen stories of people doing wonderful things for others.
I have no problem with that. Speak for yourself all you want. But don’t speak for everyone who has been through tragedy. Not everyone handles grief the same way you do.
I mean this earnestly, and in the most positive way possible:
Get help. Find a therapist, or a support group, or a psychologist, or even a good friend, and talk about your grief. “There’s nothing good left” sounds a lot like clinical depression, and depression lies.
I can’t promise that things will get better, bit believe me when I say that they can get better, and they won’t unless you seek out help.
It’s a cold and dangerous world out there; you don’t have to face it alone.
I don’t think @LearnedCoward is being an asshole, I think it hit them sideways in a way it didn’t hit the rest of us. I think how receptive we are to these stories isn’t consistent, and I think in a different mood, I’d be there with them. I think we get too wrapped up in our own context and fail to understand that people aren’t always primed to have the same reaction. I think the idea of “exploitation” needs some unpacking, because I don’t see the Santa benefiting. If anything I doubt he would want a sudden increase in gigs involving terminally ill children. This wasn’t pleasant or rewarding for him in any way. That said, it probably sold some serious ad revenue for the Knoxville Sun Sentinel, and they’re not in it for their health. But then no one is. Virtually every story you read is a product of commerce. Something-something-Karl-Marx-theory-of-alienation.
I don’t want to get too philosophical here, but I tend to think that there’s a Kantian distinction to be made here, when we derive benefit from the tragedies that have befallen others. Are we using people as a mere means or is their humanity the end in itself. I think that our experience of the tragedy relies so heavily on the very humanity of the people involved that it’s hard to see it as being exploitative in the Kantian sense. If it was the kind of insufferable glurge that is the stuff of chain-letters and Facebook posts, there might be a tipping point-- but that tends to be a function of frequency. And I can see how if that’s something you came away from and then immediately read this story, you might feel differently about its merits. Not that it’s the only reason to feel differently about it, but how we perceive things isn’t really under our control, and I don’t think it’s very… compassionate of us to accuse people of heartlessness for failure to perceive things with our context.
While that sort of thing is something that the culture at large does, I don’t feel like that’s what’s happening here on BB in this case.
This story was posted to BB by Xeni, who is in fact a cancer survivor. You don’t go through that without confronting mortality and getting your goddamn fill of hospitals. I think it is not so much about reliving the pain as it is relating with people who went through similar things.
I’ve personally been in a hospital bed facing my own demise. Obviously, the doctors figured things out and I made it out alive. I may not have wanted Santa to be there, but when I was dying, holding my wife’s hand was an immense comfort. I’m glad this kid got at least some comfort.
I don’t know your life, so I won’t say I relate, but I am sorry you’re in pain.
Is it weird that all I can think of is what an unbearably heavy load this put on the man playing santa? The child is dead, his suffering is over. The man lives on with this really fucked up experience where he was intimately involved in one of the most heart-wrenching kinds of deaths there is. But he had no connection to the people involved. No one to share the load of the grief with. His own family can only know about the child’s death through him, and he’s a stranger to the child’s family. Its a terrible experience for the child’s family, but he’s left trying to heal from the psychic damage all on his own.
No it’s not weird. The parents are grieving like any parents would. The boy has passed and is no longer of this world. Santa however is here and will live with this memory for the rest of his life. I do feel for the parents who were not there for his final moments (edit: on top of everything else of course). That may come to haunt them at their low moments.
Well, from one perspective anyway, I’d say that yes, you are wrong to think this is creepy. In fact American culture specifically (not sure if you are?) has a totally fucked, utterly unhealthy relationship with death. I would argue that our denial of physical mortality, and struggle with it, drives many if not most problems on the planet. Many cultures have a very different view of these things, and while people still of course experience loss, they don’t see death and dying in such a negative light as do so many of us who have grown up in mechanized societies, where traditional religion seems about as relevant as Cuneiform, and nothing really substantial (and meaningful) has emerged yet to replace it en masse. I for one see so-called “Tech-Gnosis” as one possible answer, but then again, I’m an odd chap with some odd beliefs about things.
