I bumped into a woman the other day; a woman I used to work with. Actually, a woman who tried to impale me with the forklift when I didn’t do her bidding. That was pretty much the last time we spoke untl I bumped into her at the gas station on Tuesday.
To be true, I didn’t recognize her or I would have laid rubber from here to some distant suburb. I still had the nozzle in the tank when she started talking with me.
I said hi back and made a politely reverential remark about her brand new grey Mustang convertible.
“Oh, yeah. My dad killed himself a couple of years ago and I bought this with my inheritance.”
Oh, golly. I have a crazy and sometimes brutal life and that is one of the chilliest things anyone has said to me in a long long time. And if you take out the times when I get paid to listen to horrific stuff, it’s been a really super long time.
“Sorry about your dad,” I say.
“Oh, it’s been a couple of years now; I am okay with it.”
“Oh,” I think.
“I heard you were sick.” says the gal who once tried to kill me.
Now, ironically, I have just come from my bloodwork appointment and still have the wee band-aid on my arm.
“Yeah,” says I, “I was sick” (Because in case you didn’t know, sick is a euphimism for any dastardly disease that makes your life more complicated than other people’s.)
“How are you now?”
“I dunno,” I say, pointing at my fresh pink band-aid, “I’ll find out next week.
It still strikes me as odd that we say “sick” to mean the flu or cancer.
I think this requires more thought.
There is more to say about all this.
April 20th, 2006 at 6:46 pm Very interesting thoughts. I also notice that when people ask how I am I try not to be too negative – I don’t want to make them feel bad. ?. How backward is that – I want them to feel okay?
Take care Spike.
Vicki
April 21st, 2006 at 10:40 am You could have said “was it because of you?” But how spiritual would that be?
Euphemisms are invariably designed to respect boundaries. Even freaks use them without knowing why.
April 23rd, 2006 at 6:50 am Hey Spike
I too have had some run-ins with pre-cancer life people. They too said some pretty dumb things. What can I say, some people are not as considerate, wise, and aware as us!
June 25th, 2006 at 12:52 pm Brilliant post. People feel they have the right to come up and say the strangest, often offensive, things to me but this lady takes the cake!