There is no substitute for pain, and some day it will be useful to you.
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.
liz said,
February 6, 2008 at 12:51 pm
My purpose in contacting you and addressing what you said was not to discredit the unavoidable facts of each of these tragedies. Good for you, you have the facts. You read the newspapers and are spitting back out this information with your own judgements. And that is why I criticize you. You have no right to judge this situation anymore than I do.
My best friend is dead and I am forever changed from that. But to this day I am not perfect, I have learned but I am still human…as you suggested each of us has faults and those should not be ignored. I agree with you on this, but to judge those so closely effected, you are wrong. The pain I struggle with everyday knowing I will never again hear my boy’s contagious laugh kills me. But my pain does not even compare to the pain of those who saw our precious boy lying in the grass hours before he was taken from us. And my pain will never compare to the pain of another dear friend of mine who lost his only sister months after saying goodbye to his best friend.
Again I ask you to stop judging these people, the living and the dead. They have endured struggles none of us can comprehend. Their actions since these events may not be idealic, but until you come up with a cure for this numbing pain and have gone through exactly what those you speak of have…you have no right to speak of this.
Wade Wheatley said,
February 7, 2008 at 12:31 am
I am sorry if I have impinged upon your grieving. I cannot imagine how hard something like that must have been (and still is) for you.
Julia said,
October 2, 2008 at 3:04 am
Perhaps you don’t fully understand the real reprecussions of your little blog. When you google my little brothers name one of the first things that pops up is not his memorial where people posted beautiful stories about him and the joy he spread to everyone he met and the beautiful pictures of him and his wonderful smile. No, its some hurtful bullshit that some kid decided to write because he was feeling particularly self righteous that day. Callous is not even the first word that comes to mind. Yes, it is years after you wrote your heartless little blog about the deaths in Deerfield but here I am at almost the 2 year anniversary of my only brothers death and your blog still hurts. You try to justify your ramblings as an attempt to “wake people up” about the dangers of drugs and alcohol but do you really think that people needed your blog to be taught a lesson about what happened? It was unnecessary and two years later it still hurts.
Nothing makes the pain of loss any better. Time heals all wounds is bullshit, it hurts like a fresh wound every day you just get used to the pain. I still read the stories that my brothers friends wrote about him because they give me some sort of peace, they let me know that somene as good as him isn’t allowed to be on this Earth for extended periods of time. The candle that burns brightest burns fastest. Yet, when I search for solace in the writings of his friends I always seem to come across your insensitive blog about his death. I look at the date and think about how you were able to sleep soundly that night, how you were able to smile that day, and enjoy your Thanksgiving (his favorite holiday). That day my brother wasn’t the only one who died, a piece of me and a piece of all of those who hold him dear died with him.
You will never understand that kind of pain until you experience it yourself. I am writing to respectfully ask you to remove my brothers name from your blog so that every time I or someone from my family search his name online we don’t have to read your preachings about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. Yes, we all understand the circumstances of his death. Yes, we all have learned something about the danger of the situation that he had put himself into. But these things are not important now, what is important is that there are people that are alive today that are still hurting. There are people alive today that don’t need to be preached to, they need to be held, loved and comforted. Your blog pours salt into the wounds of all those that will never heal. It is unnecessary.
I only ask that you do five minutes of editing to your blog to remove his name. It means so much to those that cared for him and so very little to you. I am sure that the families of the others that died that sad year would appreciate it if you were to remove their names as well. If you are truly seeking to teach people a lesson about drugs and alcohol I am sure that lesson would be just as well received if the names were not included.
I look foreword to your response.
wadewheatley said,
October 2, 2008 at 11:44 pm
You’re right, Julia. I guess I hadn’t really realized how many people were affected by some stupid thing that I had written. I have gone through and taken out real names for all of those that were the victims of various accidents in Deerfield over the past few years. I believe that I found all references, but if I missed a few it was simply by error, and I’m willing to change them. I absolutely can’t imagine how difficult loosing a sibling must be. When I imagine my sister dying, all I am faced with is a giant blank, and I have to stop thinking about it.
Although I stand by my basic points, I believe I was foolish for thinking that I could actually do something productive here. It seems to have backfired, and backfired on people who do not deserve it. I sincerely apologize for being a rude reminder of something incredibly unpleasant. I can’t promise that my site will stop showing up on Google, but I honestly hope that it does. I have done what I know how to to stop this site from popping up. If there is something I can do that I’m not realizing, please let me know and I will be more than glad to do so.
I cannot imagine how difficult this has been and still is for you, and I am sorry that I have not made it any easier.
Julia said,
October 3, 2008 at 2:39 am
I appreciate you changing your blog at my request. It no longer shows up when his name is googled. I understand what you were trying to do and bear no ill will towards you. I know that you had good intentions and I understand the message you were trying to get across. Thank you for your understanding.
Love and Peace
carly said,
October 6, 2008 at 6:00 pm
I do not deserve to be hung either Wade. Did i hurt anyone by attending the october 13th party or the one in July? NO. You deserve to be hung if anyone. LOOK AT ALL THE PEOPLE YOUR WORDS ARE HURTING