Althouse: "I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago."

August 20, 2015

"I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago."

This is a great piece of writing, by Rachel Ward.

Via Metafilter.

32 comments:

Expat(ish) said...: I thought it was sad and had that modern forced funny thinness that makes a lot of media hard to watch.

-XC; 8/20/15, 7:09 AM
rehajm said...: I'd blame the Jenny Cream Ale. That shit is toxic.; 8/20/15, 7:13 AM
rehajm said...: Was he drinking it ironically? Then it may have been the brand of Irish wake humor to which they both possessed that did it.; 8/20/15, 7:25 AM
bleh said...: I thought it was shit writing.; 8/20/15, 7:28 AM
SomeoneHasToSayIt said...: Sorry. Don't see the great writing, at all. What makes it 'great'?
I'd call it 'rambling'.; 8/20/15, 7:33 AM
Ignorance is Bliss said...: He’s missing BERNIE SANDERS ELIZABETH WARRREN AND LAWRENCE LESSIG ‘NUFF SAID.

Sound's like Steve's the lucky one...; 8/20/15, 7:35 AM
tim maguire said...: I thought it was great writing. Maybe you're turned off by the juxtaposition of the deep and the trivial, but that's life. Stupid thoughts crawl in at inappropriate moments, painful things make you laugh.

My only complaint is the fake Q&A format. The answers seem far less witty when the questions are scripted to cue the next bon mot.; 8/20/15, 7:45 AM
Hammond X. Gritzkofe said...: Two spaces after a period is right and proper.; 8/20/15, 8:06 AM
Unknown said...: Self-absorbed bad writing. Trying VERY hard to be cute. Maybe it's a coping mechanism, and I have a lot of sympathy but it's like airing not-so-dirty laundry and thinking you are providing a revelation.; 8/20/15, 8:24 AM
Freeman Hunt said...: I agree with Tim. There are lots of things that make you laugh around a death. The funeral director, for example, did not seem amused by my brother and I giggling at the clip art in the urn catalog. ("Where does this clip art come from? How is it directed? 'Here, look sad, sad like your mom died.' 'Okay, Bob, I think if you put in white people with sad faces 207 here and black people with sad faces 149 there, this layout will look great.'") The stern faced funeral director only made it funnier.; 8/20/15, 8:27 AM
Kyzer SoSay said...: I feel bad for this woman, and the writing was pretty good, but the contrived format does take some of the witty-ness away. Kinda feel like she needed the format in order to be funny, like she knew of no other way to generate a laugh.; 8/20/15, 8:28 AM
Expat(ish) said...: @kyzernick - precisely. Part of what struck me was that she desperately needed to generate a public laugh about her husband's death.

I don't get that.

-XC; 8/20/15, 8:34 AM
Laslo Spatula said...: I once had sex with a widow.

Her husband had died young, a car accident just blocks from him making his way home. He was a good man, a kind man, and many felt the loss, but -- obviously -- the hardest of the loss fell upon his wife, a beautiful young woman now overcome with grief: uncontrollable tears, uncontrollable laughter, memories both told and kept behind her eyes.

I remember that, at the funeral home, the words were -- as one would expect -- heartfelt and trite:

"How are you doing?"

"It must be part of a Bigger Plan."

"He was SO young."

If you have been to a funeral, you know all the lines.

She was starting to get shaky, overcome by the people and the words and the wishes and the prayers, so I quietly escorted her to a side room in the funeral home and fucked her in the ass with her bent over a casket and her black dress up around her waist.

Something in me told me it didn't seem proper to ejaculate on a new widow's face, so I released myself upon the pillow in the open casket, then discreetly closed the lid.

It was good to know that -- at least for a few minutes -- I could take her mind away from her loss.

The least I could do, really.

I am Laslo.; 8/20/15, 8:35 AM
Farmer said...: Man, will I be happy when this flip, faux-ironic, pretend-self-deprecating unfunny horseshit dies out. Terrible writing, by a repulsive, shallow, obnoxious woman pretending to only be playing a repulsive, shallow, obnoxious person. You're not Tina Fey, and you're not even a passable imitation. There's no there there, lady.; 8/20/15, 8:59 AM
Bill Peschel said...: Lord, that was wretched, starting with the faux-Onion headline. I genuinely wasn't sure this was real until I saw the favorited comments at the end. The artificial Q-in-A format seemed to confirm the fakery, too.

I'm sure she was trying for a meta-type piece in which her surface is all har-har-har but inside she's still soft, but her awareness that she's doing this undercuts the whole point of the har-har-har in the first place. So we're left with a pose. (And Farmer nailed how she comes across better than I did.)

"For those of you who don’t know me, bullshit is my number one stock-in-trade."

Tell it, sister. And, no, you didn't use two spaces after every period, either.; 8/20/15, 9:12 AM
Sebastian said...: MFA grad?; 8/20/15, 9:14 AM
Tyrone Slothrop said...: Q: I’ve noticed that throughout this FAQ you’ve used two spaces after a period.

A: Yeah, I’m not a fucking ANIMAL.

I am vindicated at last.; 8/20/15, 9:28 AM
Michael said...: Ah, we have come to the point when this is "great" writing. Move over Tolstoy. But then again, it is considered "great" by our hostess who seems to believe that David Foster Wallace (I love writing all three names, every time. Three.) is James Augustine Aloysius Joyce reincarnated. This woman and David Foster Wallace are a bit too precious to be great.; 8/20/15, 10:05 AM
mikee said...: I, for one, hope never to judge harshly another's attempt at working through the grief of the loss of a loved one, as I have suffered such myself and know that my response to that loss continues even three decades later.

But is it wrong that I laughed more at Laslo than the article? Because it sure feels that way.; 8/20/15, 10:47 AM
Paul said...: Bloody fucking awful and I'm not surprised the sexagenarian adolescent Althouse thinks it's great.; 8/20/15, 11:03 AM
Big Mike said...: I'm with the group of Althouse readers who didn't care much for the writing -- it seemed pretty forced to me. Frankly she comes across as a little bubble-headed.

I didn't think Laslo was funny, either.; 8/20/15, 11:04 AM
SeanF said...: Hammond X. Gritzkofe: Two spaces after a period is right and proper.

Bill Peschel: Tell it, sister. And, no, you didn't use two spaces after every period, either.

Tyrone Slothrop: Q: I’ve noticed that throughout this FAQ you’ve used two spaces after a period.

A: Yeah, I’m not a fucking ANIMAL.

I am vindicated at last.

If you're typing two spaces after a period on a webpage, you're wasting your time. HTML automatically reduces all multiple-spaces to single spaces.

Just to prove it, I put five spaces between the words "five" and "spaces" right there. What do you see?

And the "two spaces" bit was, for this reason, the most interesting thing I found in that entire article. Meh.; 8/20/15, 11:06 AM
tim maguire said...: Expat(ish) said...@kyzernick - precisely. Part of what struck me was that she desperately needed to generate a public laugh about her husband's death.

I don't get that.

-XC

Maybe because she feels guilty at finding parts of her husband's death funny and needs some affirmation that it's ok. I certainly won't judge her for it.; 8/20/15, 11:30 AM
Etienne said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 8/20/15, 11:57 AM
Tyrone Slothrop said...: SeanF said...

If you're typing two spaces after a period on a webpage, you're wasting your time.

It's the principle of the thing.; 8/20/15, 1:54 PM
Sam L. said...: Not great to or for me.; 8/20/15, 1:59 PM
Marc in Eugene said...: Perhaps on Medium the settings allow you to put two spaces after a period, although it sure doesn't look like it in the finished post-- one of those twee-ish writing/blogging sites allows you to do that, anyway.

If writing this helped the widow writing to deal with her grief and so on, fine. But I don't see how Professor Althouse can judge this to be 'great', even in the vernacular that one uses to describe the trivialities that appear everywhere daily on the Internet.; 8/20/15, 3:20 PM
Jeff Gee said...: Writing about your husband’s death in the style of a comedy site FAQ page. Interesting choice. Maybe she couldn’t write about it at all unless she gave herself some kind of formal problem to work against. Perhaps it was useful and I hope she’s feeling better. Thing is, I felt like I was being asked not just for sympathy but for approval. Maybe approvals. Isn’t it great that I’m dealing with this? and also Aren’t I clever for dealing with it this way?

And if I didn’t think it was all THAT clever, I’m kind of a dick, cuz, like, her husband is dead.; 8/20/15, 3:57 PM
Mid-Life Lawyer said...: I think it is great writing, as well. Lazlo's comment is equally great. The quibbler's over usage of "great" etc., not so much.; 8/20/15, 4:03 PM
Smilin' Jack said...: This is a great piece of writing, by Rachel Ward.

Meh. I prefer dead baby jokes. And people who use two spaces after a period should be killed twice.; 8/20/15, 4:25 PM
Bay Area Guy said...: I'm curious as to why the good Professor found this to be a "great piece of writing" too.

The subject matter is quite sad. The author's approach to this sad subject is to adopt a 13-year old-playing-video-games-in-my-basement tone.

In the past 4 years I've had two close women in my lives, one age 72, one only 42, lose their husbands. Both were very sad episodes, with major emotional ripples, still reverberating. I love a good sense humor, but, doesn't the context matter? Maybe it's me, but Ms. Ward seems tone deaf and, frankly, infantile.; 8/20/15, 7:04 PM
averagejoe said...: My thoughts and prayers are with the grieving family... But the writing stunk!; 8/20/15, 7:52 PM