A Story
You’ll never believe what happened.
Well, you might after I tell you the story. It’s a rough one. I haven’t opened up about this to many people. Okay, here I go. Have I ever mentioned Margaret to you before? No? Okay. Well she was my neighbour and died. She was thirteen, a freshman in high school and at the time I was a couple years older, a senior, which made us unlikely friends even though we grew up together. She suffered from cystic fibrosis. She knew this ever since she was really young and her family moved next door. We treated her normally as children, my sisters and I, and only when she said she was tired would we slow down our childhood play or move our energies indoors.
But we always knew she was not going to live forever, or even likely make it to her own senior prom. So we made the most of our time with her. She also knew about her condition, of the realities of her premature mortality. But she never let it get her spirits down, she didn’t see the point. Said it used up too much energy. And I admire her for that. I mean, imagine knowing you will not likely be able to get married, or have children, or drive a car. Knowing she wouldn’t get to do anything normal or related to growing up, that planning for her future was futile.
All she wanted to do was make it to a high school formal. We had heard from the doctors that her condition was worsening dramatically upon the start of her eighth grade year, so she hadn’t been going to school. But she still wanted to go to the Winter Formal (normally reserved for the seniors and their dates) and it was now apparently critical that it be this Formal, because there wasn’t going to be a ‘next year’ for her. So I brought her. And she looked beautiful. She loved every minute of the dance and nobody treated her weird because our class wanted to make an effort to make this the best memory she had. It’s all she talked about it for the few days after and insisted on wearing her dress and corsage despite the fact that she was confined to her (now)hospital bed. She died the following Tuesday. She was clutching that corsage.
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I made this up. Well, sort of. If my story sounds familiar to you, it was directly inspired by the HBO tv series Girls (Season 3, episode4). I highly recommend watching if you don’t already! Anyways, my story I just told was not meant to offend, or make light of a serious condition. The episode just really resonated with the idea of evil’s introduction to the world via storytelling. To give you some more context, (SPOILER ALERT) in the episode, Hannah’s (the protagonist) friend tells her this story in even more heartbreaking detail. And it sounds like the real deal. At the end, Caroline (the storyteller) says she made it all up just to try to provoke an emotional response.
“That’s @#%!*^ up!” might be your response. It was Hannah’s too. And mine while watching. And it was my coworkers’ reactions when I regaled them at work. What gets more f-ed up is the fact that Hannah, and myself, have taken Caroline’s initial terrible, moving, heartbreaking, lie of a story and retell it. And we retold it with uncomfortable throat clearing and tears in our eyes.
Hannah retells Margaret’s story to her boyfriend as a method of deflecting her own personal emotional struggles, and preys on his emotional response in return. She knows it is wrong, she shouted it’s “@#%!*^ up!” in a park. But she did it anyway. Just like Hannah, I had the experience of watching Caroline tell it for her sick amusement, but I also got the doubling of seeing Hannah tell it to deflect her problems. Now I’m using Caroline’s messed up story and Hannah’s recycled version as fodder for my English class. I thought this story within a story within a story to be an interesting play on the assignment of evil’s introduction. I wonder, in the end who is the most evil?
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Dunham, Lena, and Judd Apatow. “Dead Inside.” Girls. HBO. New York City, New York, 6 Jan. 2014. Television.
“The 2003 CBC Massey Lectures, The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative.” CBCnews. CBC/Radio Canada, 17 Nov. 2003. Web. 28 Jan. 2014. <http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/massey-archives/2003/11/07/massey-lectures-2003-the-truth-about-stories-a-native-narrative/>.
My My Jessica – this is certainly a fascinating exploration into stories inside stories and the potential power of stories to deceive — and in the end, it is that act of deception through story that is evil. hmmmmm. Thank you.