19 March 1999: Who Died?

During high school I belonged to Students Against Drunk Driving (SADD). I had been adamantly against drinking alcohol at all for several years before this and I would continue to believe so for another several. In this context I could at least rail against the driving. Lyme and Old Lyme had lost a senior a year to this stupidity for several years up to 1984, when the SADD chapter began; after that there have been no such deaths as far as I've heard. (And if I don't believe merely drinking alcohol is straight out wrong any more, I still loathe for anyone to drive afterward and offer rides to home and back to car again the next day to preclude such criminal stupidity.)

Anyway, I strode into my outlet for sanctimony late one Wednesday afternoon and saw my schoolmates sit silently around the room. Usual everyone was chattering. So I, ever the wit, greeted the room with, "Who died?"

Well.

I did at this point realize I had said the wrong thing again. I didn't pose my question again, although now it wasn't a sarcastic rhetorical comment. One girl and burst into tears and left the room; her friends followed.

There were reasons I was despised in high school. This might have been one, except my reputation had been firmly established by this point.

Now someone told me that, in fact, the mother of a friend of several people in the room had just died. Not the mother of anyone present, anyway, but the one girl had been particularly close to her.

I was overcome with guilt, of course, and sorrow that I had thrown this girl's grief back in her face. Several days later, after the girl had returned to school and the immediate shock might have lessened, I approached her in the hallway one day and apologized for my blunder. "I'm really sorry, what I said was wholly uncalled for," etc. She smiled wanly, accepting my apology, saying, "You know, I was so upset that day I didn't even hear you. I was about to leave anyway. Someone told me later what you'd said."

Remember what I said about being despised in high school? The sentiment against me was so strong that even though the girl had been spared the immediate pain of hearing or understanding me, her friends unleashed my sarcasm on her later.

Yes, I know I've just attempted to draw the reader's sympathy to me, the detested outsider. I hold two opinions simultaneously about this incident: I was wrong to say what I said and should have been more perceptive yet neither can her friends have been looking out for her best interests by repeating my remark.