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“Oh, Mary’s dead.”

“How did Mary die?”

“She died of breast cancer.  You know she had both her breasts cut off several years ago.  But you know Mary.  (No, I didn’t know Mary.)  She was so messed up on drugs.  Always doing something.  What a mess.  And she kept on saying, “My cancer’s going to come back.  I know it’s going to come back.”  She invited it back, you know.  It did come back.  It killed her last week.”

No, I didn’t know Mary, but I guess most in the small town of Bisbee knew Mary.  Knew her as a druggie, as a “really messed up woman.”

“Please don’t speak ill of the dead,” I wanted to say to the gathered four people in my friend’s little office when I stopped in to see how things were going there on my way back from an appointment.  “Please, don’t speak ill of the dead.”

My heart pleaded, turned to soup, cried for this dead woman I never met.  I know too much now.  I know the signs, the signs of a truly sad and tormented life.  I know where it usually starts, way back at the beginning when these dead bodies were new and little ones, all pure and innocent, so ready for life and so tormented and tortured when still small — so many — they never recover from that.

Mary?  She never recovered.

And please, those of you who have never lived through cancer either, don’t tell us “You brought that cancer down on yourself.  You thought your cancer back.”

What these people are saying of this dead woman, “Shame on stupid you!!  Shame!  Shame!  How could you be so stupid, so dumb?  We are SO MUCH better than you.”

“Please, don’t speak ill of the dead!”

I heard this before from people when another man who lived here blew his brains out.  There wasn’t QUITE such a clamber in conversations I heard about him, but still people spoke ill of him — dead.  I spoke up for that man.

“Please don’t speak ill of the dead.”

Where is the respect?  Where is the love?  Where is the compassion for people who suffer, who fall through all the cracks, who try and try and try and try and still cannot hold on any longer.

I think of the Center for Disease Control’s study where they found their subjects with the worst childhoods died 20 years earlier on the average than everyone else.

PLEASE!

DO NOT SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD!

I hear of the troubles — I can tell the infant-child abuse history — my heart grows so sad.  “God help me!  May I never speak ill of the dead.”

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