The Sound and the Fury

I recently received a comment on an old post about the deaths in Deerfield last year. I wrote a response, and thought I should post it. Here is what Liz said,

“You have no heart. Young lives were lost and that pain alone is enough. Somehow you find it acceptable to judge these situations as if you truly understand them. But I am sorry, it is clear you do not. You have misspoken and disrespected those who deserve to rest in eternal peace. I ask you to please speak only kind words when you mention anything regarding the death of one of these precious souls.”

To which I responded:

I find it interesting to get a comment on this post about the deaths in Deerfield so long after the post was put up. If you hadn’t noticed, I had rather lengthy discussions defending my position with various other people who called me heartless, among much worse names. It might be interesting and informative for you to go back through those posts and people’s comments. Perhaps I can defend myself, not because I care if you call me names or if you have a poor opinion of me, but because I feel that your attitude towards the deaths is misguided and dangerous:

I completely agree that the deaths of the five young people were incredibly tragic. No one should have to die that young. Their souls were indeed, as you say, precious, as are everyone’s. It is particularly painful when people that young die. I too, was saddened and dismayed at their deaths, and one of my most fervent wishes is that circumstances like these never be repeated, that no more teenagers die with so much potential before them.

That being said, I believe that it is essential to adopt a policy of absolute honesty when talking about the incidents. Indeed no person is perfect. I myself would like to be remembered exactly the way I am now, with my attributes remembered in the exact proportions that I presented them to the world; that I neither be remembered as any better or any worse of a person than I actually was. I believe that this is one of the greatest services that the living can do for the dead. The admittance of faults by grieving loved ones is an affirmation of the dead’s life as having been lived in all of its human triumphs and faults. It becomes a declaration of that person’s life as beautiful as it was, not as some idealized version with the bad parts edited out. If the grieving find it unbearable to remember the dead as he or she was and instead must edit that person’s life, that is either a testament to the way the deceased lived their life, or an inability of the survivors to cope with the death. Thus it is an honor to be remembered with all your faults, as this says to the world, “I was not perfect, but yet I am grieved and my time on earth was worthwhile in all the raw and naked beauty of its truth.”

On a less abstract level, your attitude is ultimately dangerous to the community. The truth of the matter is that four of those five people died in incidents directly related to and caused by underage/illegal drug or alcohol use. Those are the irrefutable facts of each case. This must have acted as a wakeup call to the rest of the high school community who were participating in these sorts of activities. Thus the deaths, while tragic, wasteful, and senseless, served a purpose in theoretically warning others against the dangers of participating in activities like drinking and driving.

This being the case, I find it counterproductive to idealize the dead and expunge the circumstances of their deaths from the public memory. Pretending that their deaths had nothing to do with the illegal actions they were participating in negates the preventative effects of their deaths. I strongly feel that martyring those four young adults serves no purpose but to console those grieving. While I cannot fault those who use this as a personal coping mechanism, I find the insistence that others think this way to be disrespectful of the dead. By elevating the dead students to a level of faultlessness, you and the entire Deerfield community are essentially asserting that each death served no purpose. You are taking away the final act of the dead, the final signifier of their life as purposeful, important, and effective. By negating the effect of their deaths you are in fact negating part of their life, fictioning it into a version that is easier to deal with, but has less impact and is more easily swept into that tragic, dusty pile of pointless teenage deaths that ultimately served no purpose.

I feel that this erasure of the dead’s faults and the non-admittance of the circumstances of their deaths and their own (limited) culpability is the greatest disrespect that you can give these young people. I would urge you to reconsider your opinion on the issue. Do not relegate these four precious individuals to the statistical anonymity of teen deaths without significance.