Not humane to make mockery of death

I’ve written a lot about my father lately. That happens when I am faced with mortality, my own or someone else’s. Death is the one human experience that connects everyone, regardless of color, creed, class or bank account.

The inequity comes only in its manner and timing. For Ted Flowers, it came on a beautiful May morning, the day before Mother’s Day in 1982, and it came after a year of agony, and it came in the form of a brutal tumor in his lungs that had exploded into the farthest reaches of his battered, beloved body. He was a 43-yearold man who looked as if he’d lived twice that span.

That sort of death is one of the worst, the prolonged cycle of hope and disappointment, possibility and devastation, dreams and living nightmares that end in prayers, tears, memorials and flowers.

I remember that sort of death, and so whenever I hear that someone else has gone through the same calvary, a narrow thread through the needle of destiny, I am hurled backwards in time to the days of anguish lived by my father and mother and siblings. And by me.

For that reason, it would never occur to me, no matter how much I hated the person who had lost his battle, to celebrate death’s victory. Of course, people of faith understand that the so-called victory is phyrric and shortlived, since as Donne wrote, “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, and death shall be no more.” Still, when you are mourning the loss of someone who some people loved, it is heartless at best, inhuman at the lowest bar of decency to laugh and taunt and say “good riddance.”

I was not surprised in the age of Twitter courtesy to see that happen when Rush Limbaugh died. The conservative radio icon had accumulated a battalion of spiteful enemies, some in high places, and they unleashed a tirade of expected vitriol.

We can’t ignore the cruel things that were said by Rush Limbaugh during his long tenure behind the microphone. While much of it was delightfully humorous, and warranted, some of it was indecent and inhuman, as when he celebrated the death of people who had died from AIDS. He did it, he acknowledged it and, to his ultimate credit, he apologized for it. He also called a certain breed of woman “feminazi,” which isn’t exactly original and did seem offensive at the time, although some members of my tribe did have an almost totalitarian way of dealing with opposition. The problem is that when you call anyone anything with the suffix or prefix “Nazi,” you divert attention away from any legitimate point you might have had, which is why I think the word did more harm than actual good.

But even with that, so what? Who cares if your sensitivities were offended by the caustic tongue of the man whose talent was on loan from God (who has it back again). Are we all these princesses sitting on our mattresses and complaining about that tiny pea, that tiny bruising kernel of truth wrapped in insults? Are we all condemned to wear that string of pearls around our necks like some shiny albatross that we clutch and finger and clutch again, any time someone uses harsh words?

In this day and age, it’s not surprising that someone like Rush Limbaugh would have angered so many people who wake up making lists of things that trigger them, or would trigger them if they only happened (and get upset when they don’t actually happen and they have to spend the rest of the day without any offense they can Tweet about).

But that still doesn’t excuse the cruelty exhibited by those who celebrated his death. And no, that is not me being triggered. That is me, desperately clinging to the façade, the chimera of human decency that I grew up believing to be the default in our relationships with other people, even those we couldn’t stand. I was taught that we do not celebrate death, even when we hated the life that was taken.

Ted Flowers was not perfect. Far, far from it. He had enemies. And yet none of them dared to laugh at his passing, and taunt those of us whose grief is, to this day, beyond imagining.

I am grateful, to God, that he died in the days when our hold on humanity was not so tenuous.