Dead Child? Heal By Deluding Yourself

Here in Boston, a grieving bullshitter named Kathi Meyer has been making the rounds on the local news stations. She is the guilt-ridden parent of Taylor Meyer—a seventeen year-old high school senior who last year was found dead in a pond after she passed out face down in it after drinking in the woods with friends. Ms. Meyer feels partially responsible for her daughter’s death because she says she failed to see the “warning signs.” She especially regrets not checking Taylor’s Facebook page, where she would have seen pictures of her daughter drinking at parties, which presumably would have induced her to attempt corrective action regarding Taylor's behavior. But because we were once seventeen also, we know this would've been a dubious proposition.

From the sound of it, Ms. Meyer—a single mother—seems to have had a typical teenage daughter who did what teenagers occasionally do: drink. I don’t think anyone can reasonably blame the woman for what happened to her daughter, even though she herself does, which is highly unfortunate. In reality, the only difference between Taylor Meyer and the average young drinker is that Taylor was unlucky enough to stumble into a pond and drown while intoxicated. The truth is, Taylor Meyer could have been any one of us in our younger days. (Raise your hand if at one point or another you were so shitfaced or high that if you passed out in a lake you could not be sure whether you'd wake up or not.)

So what’s my beef with Kathi Meyer? Like many anguished parents of dead children, Ms. Meyer has become a self-righteous, self-deluding woman whose egoistic actions have been interpreted by the media and everyone else as an exercise in public virtue. Since her daughter’s death last year, she has gone to over a dozen local high schools to admonish teens against the dangers of underage drinking, all the while receiving praise for her "selfless" efforts. Why has she been doing this? I’ll let the woman speak for herself: “I could have sat in my shell and had nothing good come from this, but Taylor wouldn’t want that.” Typical self-centered baloney from a sanctimonious grieving parent. Ninety-nine out one hundred assertions about what a dead person would or wouldn’t want are claims whose speakers have completely self-serving motives.

You see, Ms. Meyer's actions continue a trend whereby the parents of dead children become visible social activists against whatever it is that killed their children. Drinking, drugs, head injury, rabies, etc. This activism is symptomatic of an often unjustifiably guilty conscience, as well as the desire to make sense of the seemingly senseless. By translating a child's death into a cause, the grief-stricken parent attempts to place this personal and random tragedy into a structured narrative in which the tragedy is made meaningful. Rather than accept the death as a freak occurence brought forth by the whims of chance, the parent uses it as a point of departure in endeavoring to "save" others from the same fate. In this way, the child morphs into a martyr, a fallen champion of a cause she never sanctioned. Regardless, she will be made a savior who died so that others could live. It is this delusional rationale which so often drives the grieving parent.

If Ms. Meyer wants to misguidedly hold herself responsible for what happened and try to assuage her guilt by “saving” other teenagers, that’s her issue; but don’t tell me this woman is dripping with magnanimity because she’s now taking the time to warn other people’s kids about drinking. Where were Ms. Meyer and her anti-alcohol speeches before her daughter died? Oh that’s right: when Taylor was alive her mother didn’t have a seriously crippled ego in need of absolution. As such, the safety of the very kids she now lectures at schools was not a priority, as the dangers of underage drinking barely registered on her radar. Only was it after her daughter died that Ms. Meyer so nobly took it upon herself to crusade against such "reckless" behavior. This woman is free to do as she pleases, but let’s not pretend that this speaking tour of hers is pro bono work. The schools don’t pay her, but she’s getting compensation just the same: the alleviation of (misplaced) guilt—a guilt that will never totally go away.

-Max