Let's look at this one

This comment was left in the "comments" section of the last entry. Let's explore it:

Your insensitivity, your pompousness, your deluded state of being is offensive and gross. What makes you think you have the right to tell anyone else how to live. You keep crying out how everyone else is wrong and you are right, but all of your self-declarations and protestations wreak of victim-hood and blame. All of this is just ego, and a very bloated one at that.

You had no right to tell Arty how to approach her death. What you fail to see even now, is how your constant harping on about how others should live and how wise and right you are, is just a way of hiding from your own miserable little life, and sad to say, but I think a lonely little death. What you couldn't bear about Arty was that she was loved. Arty chose to live her remaining days out with those she loved. That's what gets you isn't it Raspy?

It highlights your complete inability to love and be loved.




OK. Now what kind of person writes something like that, and why? Is it to educate me? Attempt to shame me? This person's telling me that I'm "harping on about how others should live and how wise and right I am", but surely, isn't that exactly what this person is trying to do to me? And what of a "lonely little life and a lonely little death"? Is that there to console? I don't think so. To scare me, perhaps? That's more along the right lines, I think. And why tell me such intimate details? It's plainly that this person is in denial. Why else would someone write to a person they don't even know, proclaiming "the way things really are"? And if I have a "complete inability to love and be loved", then what business is it of theirs to tell me?

I'd feel pretty sorry, after all, for someone who was that way. I wouldn't want to attack them, so why does this person? This is why I always know that such sentiments are inauthentic. You don't attack a person who you think is ill, demented, or mentally ill, unless you have a complete lack of empathy yourself. See?

This is what I mean about the irrational thinking that's so common on GU. So many posters attack, declaring "Rasputin" or whatever entity they've decided I am, to be some monster, when it's really only a projection of what they are themselves.

What's amazing, too, is that they assume I have the time or inclination to become that involved in their business. I can't help thinking that the posters on GUT are far too involved with each others lives, and that it's become a huge, codependent mess.

But then isn't that where the roots of mass hysteria lie?

I know that the only person who'd benefit from some "sensitive" and "diplomatic" post from me towards these people would be me. The posters who agreed with me at the time of Artermis's illness and death know that. They're the ones who are quietly not saying anything, for fear of the same attacks from people who are going through the grieving process.

I know what it's like to be attacked by people who can't come to terms with death, and I recognise it well in others. After all, the grieving process isn't about the other person, really. It's about our own mortality.

So that's why I know to not take any of this personally.

I remember first learning this when I was a kid. My grandfather had died just a few months before, and a schoolfriend told me that his own grandfather was ill. I stared to tell him about my granddad dying, and he swore at me and punched me. "My granddad's not going to die!" he said. He was furious at me for even suggesting it.

The grieving process has so much anger because we're powerless. That's the nitty gritty of it all. When someone we love passes over, it's our own loss of connection with the divine that causes us such anguish. And this is a real clue as to where the love actually comes from.

I firmly believe that much of the love we have for other people is a dependence on the connection that person has with God, or whatever you want to call it. "Great Spirit", or whatever. When that person gets taken away from us, then we become disconnected from that source as well. So the grieving process is a matter of finding that spiritual connection for ourselves.

The first stage, though, is anger at having the connection taken away.

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's books explain this quite well.

The most ideal place that the grieving person will get to is acceptance, not just of the death of the loved one, but of their own inevitable death as well.

I know that the posters that reacted so strongly against me still have this fear of death. The wiser ones wouldn't have made any comment. After all, why should they?

If it's any consolation to some that might read this, I've done some pretty difficult grieving myself in this life. And I got helped through it by someone who's perhaps had to deal with grief more than a lot of people ever have to in a lifetime. His twin sons were murdered a few years back, and I can only begin to imagine what his grieving process was like. But he helped me with my own grieving process, and the anger that came up.

I really understand the grieving of the posters on GU over "Artermis". But I know I can't afford to get personally involved, so that's why I stay as neutral as I can.

If it appears that I'm cold or callous, that's only a projection on their parts, I know that.

But I really should move on from this subject now. This blog isn't, after all, just about death, or Guardian Unlimited. It's about one more human being trying to work out what it's all about, and keeping a (fairly) clear conscience about it.

And that, I have.