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qcontinuum) wrote2010-03-12 10:47 am
qcontinuum) wrote2010-03-12 10:47 am
Entry tags:
Mourning
OOC: Crossposted from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
theatrical_muse today.
Prompt 326: "Mourning is just extended self-pity."
The problem with having mortal friends, lovers or simply objects of interest when you're immortal is all the dying.
Mortals who make pets out of creatures with shorter life spans than they have know what I'm talking about. No matter how much you love your cat, there's a part of you deep down inside that's always getting ready to detach, because you *know* that unless a horrible tragedy happens to you, your cat will die in your life span. Which may be why mortal old ladies are willing to take on the burden of loving so many cats (or whatever... have you ever seen Vulcan matriarchs with twenty-seven chal'matyas running around their property? Sure, they *say* it's just logical because the quality of life of wild chal'matyas is so much lower than pet chal'matyas, and matriarchs whose great-grandchildren are adults can pass off all their duties to their families onto their own matriarchal daughters and spend their time rehabilitating wild chal'matyas... but come on. No one needs twenty-seven small, cute, fuzzy, venomous cat-lizard-things. But I digress.) Mortal oldsters know their own time might well run out before their pets' does.
This is not a situation I am ever in, for obvious reasons.
So I don't cry over dead mortals, because seriously, over billions of years that would be a whole lot of crying, and that would positively *ruin* my boyish complexion. Some have accused me of being utterly callous toward the death of other Q, however, because I don't seem to spend a whole lot of time mourning dead friends, either.
Here's how I see it. The dead are dead. They're gone. They no longer exist to be upset that they are dead or that no one is paying a lot of attention to them. Mourning isn't a gift we give the dead -- they can't appreciate it. Mourning is something we do for ourselves, because the person who's gone has left a hole in our existence. We don't mourn the dead, we mourn the loss of what they did for us. The things we enjoyed doing with them. The reasons we liked their company. The emotions they evoked in us.
We're upset because *we* lost something, and we dress it up in pretty decorations, acting as if our childish temper tantrum with reality is justified because the thing we lost was a sentient being. We claim that the reason we're grief-stricken is for the sake of the dead being, but honestly, why? They can't feel our pity and compassion anymore. It's ourselves, our own selfish desires, we're crying over. And while I'll cheerfully own up to being an extraordinarily selfish entity, I'd rather not be a hypocritical one, pretending that my selfishness is genuinely sorrow for another being's misfortune. If I'm going to feel compassion for someone, I'd rather save it for the living -- the dead have no use for it.
This doesn't mean I don't mourn my dead. And for a supposedly immortal, invulnerable being... I have a lot of dead. The war killed several of my best friends, and the Continuum killed several others for insufficient conformity long before the war, and Q killed himself. I have more beings to mourn than most of the Q do. But I'm not going to do it publicly, beating my breast and tearing my metaphorical hair in front of all the other Q as if any of them care, or as if any of them have the right to demand that I show them my most vulnerable emotions anyway. So yes, I *will* be completely flippant if you corner me publicly to talk about dead Q, and you all ought to know that by now, if you've been living in a Continuum with me for five billion years.
theatrical_muse today.Prompt 326: "Mourning is just extended self-pity."
The problem with having mortal friends, lovers or simply objects of interest when you're immortal is all the dying.
Mortals who make pets out of creatures with shorter life spans than they have know what I'm talking about. No matter how much you love your cat, there's a part of you deep down inside that's always getting ready to detach, because you *know* that unless a horrible tragedy happens to you, your cat will die in your life span. Which may be why mortal old ladies are willing to take on the burden of loving so many cats (or whatever... have you ever seen Vulcan matriarchs with twenty-seven chal'matyas running around their property? Sure, they *say* it's just logical because the quality of life of wild chal'matyas is so much lower than pet chal'matyas, and matriarchs whose great-grandchildren are adults can pass off all their duties to their families onto their own matriarchal daughters and spend their time rehabilitating wild chal'matyas... but come on. No one needs twenty-seven small, cute, fuzzy, venomous cat-lizard-things. But I digress.) Mortal oldsters know their own time might well run out before their pets' does.
This is not a situation I am ever in, for obvious reasons.
So I don't cry over dead mortals, because seriously, over billions of years that would be a whole lot of crying, and that would positively *ruin* my boyish complexion. Some have accused me of being utterly callous toward the death of other Q, however, because I don't seem to spend a whole lot of time mourning dead friends, either.
Here's how I see it. The dead are dead. They're gone. They no longer exist to be upset that they are dead or that no one is paying a lot of attention to them. Mourning isn't a gift we give the dead -- they can't appreciate it. Mourning is something we do for ourselves, because the person who's gone has left a hole in our existence. We don't mourn the dead, we mourn the loss of what they did for us. The things we enjoyed doing with them. The reasons we liked their company. The emotions they evoked in us.
We're upset because *we* lost something, and we dress it up in pretty decorations, acting as if our childish temper tantrum with reality is justified because the thing we lost was a sentient being. We claim that the reason we're grief-stricken is for the sake of the dead being, but honestly, why? They can't feel our pity and compassion anymore. It's ourselves, our own selfish desires, we're crying over. And while I'll cheerfully own up to being an extraordinarily selfish entity, I'd rather not be a hypocritical one, pretending that my selfishness is genuinely sorrow for another being's misfortune. If I'm going to feel compassion for someone, I'd rather save it for the living -- the dead have no use for it.
This doesn't mean I don't mourn my dead. And for a supposedly immortal, invulnerable being... I have a lot of dead. The war killed several of my best friends, and the Continuum killed several others for insufficient conformity long before the war, and Q killed himself. I have more beings to mourn than most of the Q do. But I'm not going to do it publicly, beating my breast and tearing my metaphorical hair in front of all the other Q as if any of them care, or as if any of them have the right to demand that I show them my most vulnerable emotions anyway. So yes, I *will* be completely flippant if you corner me publicly to talk about dead Q, and you all ought to know that by now, if you've been living in a Continuum with me for five billion years.