I'm not trying to be superior; I have no wish to die prematurely. When I had my first colonoscopy two summers ago, I mentally shat my pants for a week waiting for the results to come back. I'm not unscared when confronted with confronting the Great Beyond. But I don't get why talking about death freaks people out so much. There must be other cultures that handle it a bit better than we do and I really ought to research them, what makes them different from us. When you know someone who dies, and in my case a young parent (back me up on this fellow half-orphans), death ceases to become an awkward topic of conversation and becomes as normal as checking movie times. And at least for me, it lost that sense of taboo that it had before I lost my mom and became something that I longed to talk about because I was never allowed to. My one friend who lost her father and my cousin who also did are the only people (other than my bro) with whom I've felt like I was able to talk normally about it. To everyone else it seems macabre, and you have to edit everything you say about the subject, or you worry no one will want to hang out with you again. You also lose the sense of what is macabre and what isn't, as though the thermometer that normally tells you which lines not to cross got busted at 110 and no longer works. I get so overexcited when I find someone else with a dead parent that I have to restrain myself and try to act normally and not assume that their experience was the same as mine, or that they are as strange as I am. :)
Sometimes when you mention a parent having died to someone, you can see the other person's brain going round like a computer trying to load a webpage--they're desperately trying to find an appropriate yet noncommittal thing to say that will assure you of their social competency while simultaneously avoiding a prolonged conversation about death. After this happens a few times, you start to feel bad for imposing situational awkwardness on other people, so you end up trying to rephrase things so as to make them as innocuous as possible.
The whole kibosh on the death talk makes it extremely awkward when you have to answer a question that, in my case, involves the words "mom" or "parents." These are the things you never have to think about when you have a normal life. Example: That's a beautiful necklace, where did you get it? It's not appropriate to say the actual answer: I found it in my dead mom's jewelry box and liked it, so I took it because she's not likely to wear in anytime soon seeing as how she be Miami-DADE County. Get it? Like dead with a Kentucky accent? I don't care if you don't think this joke is funny, because for some reason I really do, and I'm allowed to say it because I lived in Miami. But anyway, what are you supposed to say? Still likely to provoke odd/pitying looks and uncomfortable silences is "It was my mother's." People pause and wonder if they're supposed to ask what happened to her, or if they should assume she just gave it to you as a gift and is still in the picture.
This is going to sound really silly, but something I really hate to talk about because it inevitably leads to an awkward conversation/ because it feels like lying: My parents house. I have a house that I can visit, it is my parent's house. Yet I feel weird saying my parent's house, like I'm somehow secretly trying to lie about my mom being dead. So I say, "my dad's house." But when I say "my dad's house," it makes me feel either like a child of divorce or like my mom is a dead beat that ran out on us. And then sometimes people ask, oh, where is your mother, and I don't want to make them feel awkward by telling them the truth. Sometimes people ask me where my parents live in the course of getting to know me, and this is worse because then I also invariably have to say: "my dad lives in…" or just name the place without saying "my parents live…" because then seemingly run-of-the-mill small talk becomes uncomfortable. Does everyone else overthink the way I do?
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