Sudden Departures

Right now I’m listening to my yearly mandatory data privacy training in the background so this might be a little disjointed. It feels a bit ironic to be learning about (or tuning out) all this verbiage about structured and unstructured threats, internal and external risks, risk and threat registers, and so forth, when I feel like I constantly perseverate about threats, risk, and well, let’s face it — death — all the time.

The worst has happened. When will the worst happen again? It will surely recur, won’t it? Someone will wake up dead or disappear again. In the Compassionate Friends meeting, I talked a little bit about my fear that everyone I care about is going to wake up dead, or die suddenly. Other people commiserated with similar fears, fashioned to the type of death they had experienced. Everyone is going to die in a car accident. Or of a brain tumor. One member who went to the national convention for our group told me he had attended a meeting just for parents who lost their children in car accidents. Apparently those people have an especially hard time when friends or family members drive away in a car. They fret and assume there will be a terrible accident and ask to be called on arrival and so forth. I don’t know what would be harder; people have to sleep, they have to ride in cars too.

I’m watching the show The Leftovers right now and it deals with loss and a fantasy event they call “The Sudden Departure” where many people just disappear. It’s a good show, I like it. But part of the plot is that there’s a cult who are trying to focus everyone on this loss, which happened several years previously, and make them “remember” their departed loved ones. It strikes me as a bizarre conceit. The people who lost family members, even though they go about their everyday lives, work, eat, whatever, cannot have forgotten the departed. They don’t need reminding. I’m sure they think about their loved ones almost every moment of the day, regardless of what’s happening in the real world. So I just don’t get that.

If someone were to remember or commemorate Sarah with me, building a lifesize doll of her (as they do in this show to make the townspeople think about their dead) I would be thrilled, not angry. Wow, you were thinking about her too. How wonderful.