sympathetic

when i was in high school we had two students who had cancer. (i went to a small school.) one of them was very sick for a while and then came back to school. the other one was okay for a while and then had to be hospitalized. i don't know what ended up happening to either of them.

when the second one was hospitalized my school had a kind of prayer service thing in the gym with music and i think maybe some of the student's friends said nice things about him and prayed that he would get better. it was very sad and lots of people were crying.
a little while into the service i cried too but it wasn't because anyone had cancer. i was in the same french class as both of the sick kids and both of them were total assholes. it's not like i think assholes deserve to die of cancer but i thought it was pretty dumb that everyone was pretending that they knew these kids on a personal enough level to stand at a podium and talk about how they were best friends or whatever. people don't become saints just because they're sick. i was hospitalized with a kidney infection in the 5th grade and my teachers made my classmates make me cards. all of the cards talked about how much my classmates liked and missed me but as soon as i got better and was able to return to school, everyone went right back to treating me like shit because i was awkward and weird-looking and poor but also too smart to slide under the radar.

anyway the reason i cried at that service was because it was the first time i realized that if i were dead or dying nobody would bother doing something like that for me. when something bad happens to a person, how the community and media and police react depends on what they think the person was like. when i first realized this i felt very cynical and selfish, because what i was really wishing was that someone would care enough to cry in public if something bad happened to me. of course as an adult i'm aware that this is totally a real thing, but also, as a person who's spent a lot of time thinking about what it'd be like if i died, it upsets me on a personal level still. i used to think that if i killed myself my friends would be relieved that they didn't have to deal with me anymore. i don't know if i still think that, but i also don't think anyone would be holding memorial services or candlelight vigils or anything. the most i could hope for is that whoever got the job of hauling my corpse out of the river or whatever would feel something other than mild inconvenience.

i wish i didn't think about these things.