How Women and Americans React to Death

And women much more than men think life is a raw deal because we get a brief glimpse of it for a moment and then it is snatched away from us forever. As my Mom said:

Life is sort of lousy. It’s sort of a raw deal.

And she gave precisely that reason.

Women are sensitive and death hits them real hard. A lot of women can’t even talk about death, especially their own of that of loved ones, especially future death, without breaking up and crying. My Jewish girlfriend was like that. She broke up when she talked of her own future demise. My mother broke up too sometimes when she talked about her future death. Other times she looked at me as if to say:

This is real shitty. I’m going to die. Is that fucked up or what. Fuck this death shit. This sucks!

She had that “life is a raw deal” look about her. One time she was talking about my brother’s future death and she broke up crying:

He wants to be buried with his guitar.

My aunt died young of breast cancer at age 32. My mother was always sad about that. And one of her relatives died in World War 2. His plane was shot down over Saipan. He was very young. She always thought that was very sad too.

I’ve talked to women from other cultures whose had had a parent died. They were aged 18-43. One had lost both her mother and her father and to her, her whole life was tragic. Furthermore, she lived with her sister, and her sister hated her. She was a pretty lonely person. She broke up crying when she talked about any of these things and in fact, the subjects of her mother, father, and sister could not even be broached. Yet she could be very happy, happy as a barrel of ticks, happy as a human can be.

I knew a Pakistani women in her 30’s who had lost her father. She could not talk about him at all and she got very sad if you brought him up.

And I met a very young woman from Cuba, 18 years old, who had lost her father. Same thing, she couldn’t talk about him.

Few Americans are that messed up about death that they can’t even talk about their own dead parents. I know neither of my parents were like that. Although if you look above, you will see that all of the above lost parent(s) early in life, that is, their parent(s) died young, which is particularly sad.

Americans deal with death by simply not discussing it. I recently lost someone very important to me, perhaps the most important person in my life. When I tried to talk about it in depth, everyone just shut me down. I mentioned it to my doctor and he changed the subject immediately. He didn’t want to hear about it at all!

Another time I lost a girlfriend of three years. I grieved for 10 whole months. People got tired of my grief real fast. I had people ordering me to get over it even the first time they heard me say it. Others pretty much cut me off when I wouldn’t get over it. So Americans simply don’t allow each other to grieve at all, period. I doubt if that is healthy. But a Colombian woman did the same to me. She said:

RIP!

Please follow and like us:
error3
fb-share-icon20
Tweet 20
fb-share-icon20

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

error

Enjoy this blog? Please spread the word :)