Speechless

I've been dumbstruck for several days, unable even to begin putting my thoughts into words.

A remote [thank God!] acquaintance recently lost a close relative to suicide.

Very close relative. First degree, as the health establishment likes to say.

This individual has been milking the death of that relative, for sympathy for themselves, nonstop, ever since the event.

I haven't seen this person spend even an instant thinking about what their relative must have been going through that would drive them to take such action. Not even a momentary flash of curiosity about that. Not a particle of self-examination, of wondering if there was anything they did, or didn't do, could have done, could have seen, that might have made the difference between life and death.

I haven't seen this person spend a nanosecond wondering how that relative's sibling is handling everything - or anything.

I haven't seen a femtosecond of genuine grief over this life destroyed, this future lost, this whole human universe gone beyond recall, the love this person now won't live to feel, the children they now won't live to bear.

There has been nothing from this survivor but a torrent of self-centeredness,

indistinguishable in almost every respect from their usual torrential self-centeredness,

except that the crisis being used to justify the current debauch of self-absorption is a terrible and irreversible human tragedy, not the usual broken fingernail/bad hair day.

But it's all the same to this person.

Quite clearly, a child dead by suicide is just material for drama, to this individual. Even when it's their own child whose death they're exploiting.

Because the survivor of whom I am speaking so critically happens to be the dead girl's mother.

And there's another daughter in the family. Who is receiving, as far as I can determine, no help, no support, no attention, no intervention, while Mommy Dearest frets and obsesses about being less well dressed than the neighbors who drop in to pay condolence calls.

Imagine the moneyed suburban hell that girl - and her surviving sister - must have lived in. Imagine the hell the surviving child must now be facing alone.

Imagine a mother so totally selfish, so lacking in any semblance of motherhood, that even her own child's death by suicide is ALL ABOUT HER.

I've been waiting until I could discuss this event from a sufficiently detached perspective... but I don't think I'm ever going to achieve a detached perspective.

This is obscene, and it's never going to stop being obscene.