How To Even…Talk About Someone Else’s Tragedy

By Michael Gushue & CL Bledsoe

Life is pain. Some dead person said that, probably when they couldn’t find any after dinner snacks. Or maybe it was a tattoo on that biker chick who beat us up outside of Bennigan’s, which, honestly, has happened several times. Some people have said that the greatest tragedy of our lives is that we’re aware of our impending death, and others have said the greatest tragedy is that we only truly appreciate things when they’re gone. Unfortunately, our GoFundMe to sponsor anthropomorphic representations of tragedy arm-wrestling for final superiority wasn’t funded, so the world will never know. (Hint: it’s actually Capitalism.)

But terrible things happen, and they happen all the time. Things so bad that we feel like we could never survive. And we’re not even talking about politics. (But we kind of are). Still, we (sometimes) do survive those terrible, life-altering things, and then we discover the true horror: people trying to express sympathy.

Picture it: you’ve gone through some life-changing tragedy. Maybe it’s a physical thing or a mental thing or an emotional thing. Maybe your foot was eaten by the person you thought was your soulmate. And then that person had the audacity to complain about how gamey it tasted. And what really sucks is you’d just loaned them your favorite Blueray…