I often wonder if relatives and friends of the deceased will ever see those threads. You just know that at some point, they will do a Google search and likely our threads will come up and they will see us cracking wise about the circumstances of their loved one's untimely death. Something to think about.
I try not to participate in those threads but on occasion, I have been guilty of contributing a pithy comment or two with respect to "Darwin Award" candidates.
I guess in a nation of 317,785,000 people and a planet of some 7,046,000,000; it's easy to become desensitized to the pain and suffering of those who share the planet with us. I guess it's hard enough just keeping up with those in our immediate social circles so when we hear about some surfer in Hawaii getting eaten by jellyfish or some poor soul floating out to sea during a baptism, there is adequate distance for most of us to make light of it in some way.
I think another factor is the Internet. Somebody dies in an usual way and it goes viral. Suddenly hundreds of millions of people across the globe are reading about how that person died. Think about that. When I was a kid in the 1970s, there was almost no way to know what happened to regular people that wasn't printed in your hometown paper.
In 1977, one of my classmates was run over by a train because he was "playing chicken." A Darwin death for sure. But nobody outside my school ever knew the circumstances and even the hometown paper had just had an obituary and left out the details out of respect for the parents. The Boston papers did print a story about a child getting run over by a train but they did not print his name so unless you lived in my town, you would not be able to put 2 and 2 together.
Such a different world today.
Very moving post. I hadn’t thought about how my levity might be viewed by family members.