What to do With Horror Shows
Grandma at Halloween
I feel a sort of haze over me, lately, like I can’t quite think properly. October has been a hard month for me. Things affect me much more than I want them to. The massacre of civilians in Israel has been heavy. I can’t even watch most of the footage because a simple written description of some of the things that happened gets stuck on repeat in my mind. I wake in the middle of the night and it plays again.
Why are so many enamored with Halloween? Isn’t this horror show enough? Can’t you see that for every horror film released right now, there is a worse reality that some flesh and blood soul is living or…dying?
It has been a beautiful fall here in South Carolina, and I’m angry because now it looks menacing. Indian summer—the time when savages go forth to kill. Wicked people have shed innocent blood, filmed it, uploaded their victims’ last moments and desecrated them, and it feels wrong to enjoy a beautiful day when so many are in agony.
It’s coincided with a return of my old friend, fatigue. I am not quite sure why I am so exhausted all the time right now, but I am.
Maybe it’s because I hear words like “decolonization” and “ceasefire” left and right from people in my country who wouldn’t know a hardship, a real hardship, if it slapped them in the face. And perhaps it’s because of this, that they have no compassion for the people who horrifically died, were brutalized, or were kidnapped. So little compassion that they tear the posters of the missing down, missing babies even, and throw them away—in the proper recycling bin of course. These are the sort of villains we have right now. Couldn’t care about people who hurt and bleed, but they do care an awful lot about littering.
I went for a walk in the cow pasture with Jonathon and I could not stop crying. He reminded me of one of my favorite hymns, “This is My Father’s World.” He reminded me that taking joy in the beautiful sights all around me is a judgment and a defiance against those who would fill God’s beautiful world with blood. “Although the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet.”
So, I will try.
I was reminded of something I wrote four years ago in early November and I thought I’d share it here. I’ll close with that.
Grandma at Halloween
It’s odd the kinds of things that jog my fond memories. Last week’s Halloween revelry is one of them. This is odd because I generally dislike the holiday intensely. I find it sordid, uncouth, and ugly. Last week, I pondered whether Halloween could be used to express memento mori—remember that you will die. In other words, life is fleeting. Tomorrow, we could be rotting in our graves. So, live like your short life means something. Be productive. The things that won’t rot in the grave with you are the intangible, eternal things.
But I shook my head. That’s not really how most celebrate Halloween. Casually observed, Halloween seems more about the “eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die” ethos. It’s sexual excess, gore, decay, and horror for the cheap thrill of sexual excess, gore, decay, and horror. Not a whole lot of redemptive purpose in any of that as far as I can see.
And yet…when the light began to fade on Halloween last week, I felt a little warm glow in my heart and a sudden mental picture of my Grandma Barber with her bucket of candy by the front door of 3541 Duke St. Her face was positively lit up with smiles, bestowing love and sweets in equal measure on each kid who knocked on her door.
Grandma was, as far as I’m concerned, the quintessential grandmother figure. There was a certain grace and dignity about her person—the grey hair and wrinkles, the pink plastic curlers she used to set her hair every night, the dresses ordered from old people catalogs, the powder she used on her nose, the little bottles of perfume on her dressing table. She did not try to be what she was not. She did not try to ignore the fact that she was getting old and would die. She accepted things as they were and found immense joy in small pleasures—like little children in cute costumes, begging for candy.
Ten years later, I would also stand at the door on 3541 Duke St. and hand out candy to the little kids in costumes, remembering how my grandma did it and how important she found each child and how important she made them feel—how important and loved she made me feel.
It occurs to me that I learned how to treat children, in part, from the example of my Grandma Barber. It was her example that taught me not to fear the aging process and the inevitability of death and decay, at least as much as it is possible not to fear these things. I learned that love and kindness are forever and that youth and health are not. Memento mori. I learned many of these things from her—unaware that I was learning anything, and she unaware that her mere existence taught them—at Halloween. A holiday I can’t stand.
Life is funny, isn’t it?
That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…