Page 1
Myles Cooper
09/22/2014
INQ 110 U
A Journey into the Soul
There are some positives in tragedy, is that a weird statement? Yes, probably but it holds some truth in it surprisingly. I mean I never thought that, because when I think about tragedy I think about a number of things: death, sadness, remorse, and just a whole slew of emotions and feelings but there is some light in the “dark tunnel.”After reading Journey into Night (David Sedaris) I immediately related with him; he felt awkward when he was faced with tragedy head on, but then he soon found positives to avoid all the awful thoughts of death/pain. I myself do the same, I guess it is just a coping mechanism for Sedaris.
How would you react if someone suffering was just thrusted into your everyday life, most people will say “I’ll make them feel better,” but will you really? Probably not. And that’s how I can relate with Sedaris, he doesn’t paint himself as this warm hero, he is awkward and extremely uncomfortable with the situation with the crying Polish man, with extremely large hands, who took the seat next to him, due to complaints of “excessive” crying after learning that his mother had died.
Page 2
“I felt that I should say something, but what? And how? Perhaps it would be better, less embarrassing for him, if I were to pretend that he wasn’t crying—to ignore him, basically. And so I did.” (Sedaris 198)
This feeling of the responsibility to help, yet this fear of getting involved is something we all through when we are thrusted into something uncomfortable.
I myself have been in a similar situation with one of my exes. She was a tall blonde haired girl, with fair skin, and we both ran track and had some classes together. She had recently had recently suffered a loss in her family, her grandmother in Oklahoma had passes, and being the “suave guy” I was I had no idea how to make her feel better. It was kind of like steeping on eggshells, I felt like saying something but was it the right thing, and then I just thought imagine that this situation never would work. It didn’t. It was just hard because she was in such a fragile state of mind, and you just fear that saying anything wrong could lead to crying, or just getting yelled at. Similar to Sedaris I thought that there way of making this situation, because I could relate to how the other person felt, even at some points “so,well,over the top.” (Sedaris 201). And then I thought. The best thing to do is to look at the positives.
But how does find the positives in something tragic such as death? Most people cry, like my ex, and most normal people on the planet, or you could laugh about and find the positives in the tragedy. Sedaris does this throughout this piece; exploring the Brightside of death. I believe that his philosophy is that there is always some good in the bad/tragic things. One passage from the piece that best emphasizes this idea of good in the bad is when he talks about a girl in his
Page 3
middle school that died from leukemia; he never talked to the girl, but mourned for her almost like they were lovers in a cheesy soap opera, as he wailed “Why her and not me?” (Sedaris). Then he remembers that he never even communicated with at all, yet felt all this sadness. Sedaris remembers a different event, but it still was tragic. He was at a funeral for his mother with his sister and instead of feeling pain for the death of his mother he sees “One guy with his shirt off,” (Sedaris 199) while the procession is going on. Now some may think this is just and observation by Sedaris, but he probably needed something positive, and humorous, to cope with his loss.
Back to my ex. In the end I did make her feel better, I told her to stop feeling all this remorse and start thinking about all the positives about you grandmother. It help her get through that tough period in her life. I used that same philosophy when I lost my grandmother a few months before my graduation. She was a small gray haired women who was very religious, and strong; when I saw her in the ICU ,literally being kept alive by machines, I didn’t feel like crying, instead I thought about all the positives: like all the food she made, the masses went, and all the funny stories she told us about our parents when they were younger. It was the best way to cope with the situation,
Sedaris idea, or even philosophy, of using positive things to ignore the tragedy in a sense is something we both share. We do this to avoid all the awkwardness, tears of tragedy because it is just good look at the good things about a person that passed, rather than feel remorse and even regret.