This time of year is itchy for me. Sometime in April I start to feel a little more high-strung. I find myself crying at lame as commercials or a song that catches me and reminds me of some emotional time in my life. (Hello, bad 80's song, I haven't cried to you since I was 12.) I quite put my finger on what my problem is. I know that I am just a little off. More prone to needing reassurance, more prone to beat myself up about anything that goes wrong, just more .......something.
And then I wake up and slap my forehead.......It's about the time of year that Carl started getting really sick. So of course I am a little itchy. And it's the time of year for TV deaths.
Before Carl died, TV watching was easy. Sure it sucked if some actress moved on and they offered her in the season finale, but I never really thought twice about it. Now, sweeps season is fraught with difficulty. I know that I am not alone. My mom has a friend who's son was murdered, afterward she couldn't watch a lot of the shows that she liked before then. All the CSI, Law & Order shows where someone's murder was the beginning plot point were too hard for her. While I still have my murder/mayhem shows intact, I am left with a problem with shows killing off people naturally.
The first year it caught me off guard, a minor character in a show dies of some random thing. Of course she knows she is dying an gets to say good-bye. Queue a touching scene followed by her getting "tired" and she dies within a few moments. I cried for two hours and then spent half the night composing emails (that I never sent) in which I called the TV writers every name in my (used to date soldiers and sailors) potty mouth vocabulary. I accused them of duping the citizens by perpetuating the belief that death comes easy for people and that this is the reason that people won't move forward to allow people who are terminal to die with dignity, because Hollywood tells them that their death will be easy anyway. But, I petered out and went to bed.
Since then I have been a little more cautious around May. But today I got gobsmacked by a character who dies after his wife died a couple of months ago, leaving his daughter an orphan. And all I can think about is that one of the worst things about widowhood is the random unexpected blows from out of the blue that leave your reeling for no good reason. I shouldn't be impacted by the lazy plot device trotted out in some crappy TV show, but I am. Tomorrow I will be better, but for tonight..... Nielsen can suck it.
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