Lost

I have a few friends on Facebook lately who've had the supreme sadness of burying a parent, a sibling or worse (the ultimate horror) a child. I cannot and do not want to try to imagine the sadness that these people struggle against. The seemingly insurmountable daily sadness... I shudder to think about it and don't believe I can finish the sentence about it.

But my writing today isn't about that. My reference in naming this post "Lost" wasn't to the family members who've gone before us into the Great Somewhere, but in the Lost Art of Wordsmith. There is a certain amount of Grace that is required of the condolence writer. Sadly, the advent and perpetuation of cyber communication have left a generation of incapable letter writers.

When I was growing up, we learned all kinds of "social graces". We learned how to eat without making our companions sick, how to carry a conversation, and how to write letters, among other things. To be fair, some of those things I learned reading a book written by a friend of my mom's. Learning those graces wasn't supposed to get us into Harvard or MIT, but they would (in theory) help us make and keep friends, help us be Creatures of Beauty and Grace, and, I think, mostly to teach us to think about others with Thought instead of as Mere Others. I think that makes sense.

My point is this: in a world where we can announce our Loved One's passing on Facebook, and our "friends" can post their condolences as comments on a thread, there is a surprising and sad lack of grace. The comment threads that I see typically say something to the effect of "I'm so sorry for your loss". But I have to tell you that if my brother, uncle, mother, child (God Forbid) had just died, the last thing I would want is 200 comments on my Facebook page saying "sorry for your loss" and the problem is, the reason that people post that is because they don't know what else to say. We live in an world that has allowed it to be okay not to learn how to tell someone you're deeply saddened by the news of someone's passing. We live in a world, it seems to me, in which those social graces I learned growing up are odd and even sometimes mocked!

My heart is sad for my friends. I wrote notes of condolence, not because I had to, but because I wanted to. I considered my friends; I thought about their loved ones; I sat down with pen and paper and I wrote from my heart, using the strategies that I'd learned so long ago. Perhaps, as I go through life and teach my children the graces that are ingrained in me, they will not be lost and gone forever.

Otherwise, rest in peace, Social Graces.