Previous installments of The Toast’s advice column from two disparate and imperfect persons can be found here. Last time: Nails and Aisle-Walking.
Hi! I have a bit of a time-sensitive question, but no pressure! It’s also probably easy, if that helps?
My next-door neighbor’s husband died two days ago, in a horrific and sudden way. I’ve only been their neighbor for about 10 months, we are just hi-bye friends, though we’ve had a handful of actual conversations (about xeriscaping, cars, neighborly things). I am totally heart-broken for her and for her husband, who seemed like a really good man. I have dealt with enough loss to know about the protocol on how to support her without overwhelming her, but what I am worried about is Halloween.
I love Halloween, and usually put up some hardcore decorations for it. Dark, memento mori stuff. This is my first year owning a proper front yard to decorate, and I’ve been prepping and pinteresting for months. Mostly ghosts and ghouls and dismembered body parts. I have already put a kibosh on the graveyard I was planning on, but I am worried I should just not do anything vaguely death-related because . . . it just seems mean to have up next to her house? But I also don’t want to treat her like some fragile widow to be pitied and coddled, and it IS Halloween, that stuff is going to be around. But then again, my dad died three weeks before Father’s Day, and even though I knew it was illogical to ask the world to ignore that holiday, I really would’ve appreciated it. Do I need to put away the homemade chicken-wire ghosts and focus on spiders and bats this year (or . . . nothing)? Am I overestimating my yard’s importance in the face of her tragedy? Am I a jerk for even asking this question?
Nicole: This is a new question! This is a new question. Wow. Okay. First of all, kudos to you for #leaningin to Halloween, I like to see that in a person, honestly. Now, to your particular question. Me, I’d cool it with the death this year. You included a link to an article about the actual accident, which, as per your request and common decency we are not putting in the piece, but, guys, it sucked. It was not great. I do not think you are remotely a bad person for asking this question, but I think that spiders-cats-bats is definitely the way to go.
Do not look upon it as a restriction, but rather a challenge! Perhaps a good year for horrifying, but living clowns!
Now, unless you are her only neighbor, she’s going to see a lot of things about death. And she’s going to be thinking of it all the time, anyway, and there’s very little you can do. But I think YOU will feel better, knowing you’re attempting to be sensitive to her emotional state. The only other thing I would say, apart from “wtf is xeriscaping?” is that you should try to be really good to her right now, as I’m sure you already are. And by that, I mean, do things for her that don’t place any obligation on her to talk or be nice or thank you. If you know she’s home, put a freaking casserole on the step with “for the freezer” and a list of the contents on top. If you’re raking leaves, rake her leaves when she’s at work. Not, like, creepy overinvolved stuff, but, again, you’ll both feel better.
Mallory: Oh, my God, the memento mori thing. Weird how that’s true, and not just a funny Halloween gag!
It can be so difficult to know how to handle being adjacent to, but not directly affected by, someone’s death. It’s so hard to know what to do, or what to say, and for those of us who haven’t yet experienced a sudden death in the family and therefore don’t know what we’d want someone to do or say to us in the same situation have to just guess madly. Something that may be worth bearing in mind is that no matter what decorations you do or don’t put up, this will almost certainly never be the Halloween she remembers the most vividly because of you.
I don’t know if she would find the sight of a limb-strewn house horrifying and painful, or darkly funny and kind of cathartic; I don’t know if she’s going to spend the next few months in a haze of gin and muscle relaxants. She might not even notice you still live there. The shitty part is, of course, the fact that you can’t ask her which she would prefer, because maybe she’d rather you didn’t but might not feel comfortable saying so, or maybe she wouldn’t even have noticed if you hadn’t said anything but now she does and feels terrible.
I wish I could sort of disagree with Nicole, because that would make for a more interesting column, but she’s very practical and compassionate, our Nicole, and also quite good at pushups. Stress the bats and the witches this year, going rather easy on the mangled corpses (outdoors at least), and the reward of a sound night’s sleep will be yours. Also, your house sounds very fun; please invite me to your Halloween parties.
Tags: advice, advice from two disparate persons, death, halloween, she said she said
A++ perfect advice, nothing to add. Bats, cats & witches. And shit-tons of candy, as Satan intended.
A++ Indeed. And Mallory is so right, that Adjacent To Sorrow place is an odd place to be. Not hard, exactly, because adjacent-sorrow is not about you the nearby person. Figuring out how to be compassionately peripheral is not one of life’s great burdens. It’s the sort of thing advice columns are for, really. You can ask someone for an opinion with a full view of how unimportant you are in the scheme of one other person’s particular grief.
Great, great advice!!! I’ll also point out: Monsters!!! Monsters can be super-duper freaky-looking, and they don’t have to be terribly death-y! Like this dude:
There is no dude! Where is the dude? I want to see the dude.
Oh is my image code not working?? You can also see it here: http://i.imgur.com/LJ90JyV.jpg
Eek!
Also, be sure to add ALL OF THE DECORATIVE SEASONAL GOURDS. You could spray paint them black if the orange/white/green isn’t sufficiently creepy enough.
I was also trying to brainstorm other Halloween-related figures, and then realized that they’re a bit on the undead side. Is Is the consensus that the undead (zombies, vampires, mummies, Frankenstein) would also be tasteless? What if they’re cartoony?
Maybe werewolves would be the best way to go here, if you like to go in the direction of monsters. Clowns are too unsettling.
This picture, on top of being cute and reminding me of werewolves, also reminded me of weird fishmen/sea monsters:
Of course, take all of this with a grain of salt, as it’s coming from a woman who uses Halloween as an excuse to 1) celebrate her cats and 2) carve pumpkins. My pumpkin carving motifs of this year will be cats (obviously) and then red pandas because of this:
YES! Clearly the solution for the letter writer’s problem is to limit her holiday displays to representations of Lovecraftian horrors!
That’s a pretty cute Deep One in that picture there.
OMG. Nothing is darker than praying to be the first to be eaten by the Elder Gods.
p.s. Have you seen Hello Cthulu?
Pumpkin carving! I think the letter-writer should get wild with the carved gourds. Do that thing where you make one pumpkin eat another pumpkin. Or give them candy teeth. Whatever. I can never make that peeled thing the red pandas have going work, but I’m in awe of people who can.
I feel like she could maybe get away with cartoonish vampires (no coffins!), but would avoid the undead in general. Grief can be weird and associative. Years ago, I lost a friend to homicide, and for a long time, I couldn’t deal with any depictions of violence on TV or in movies, even if it didn’t involve how she was killed. Err on the side of oversensitivity, I guess I’m saying.
I have neighbors who just do a whole choir’s-worth of carved gourds. Many of them! All sizes and shapes! A candle bank of carved autumn veggies.
And for kicks you could do tip o’lanterns (carved turnips) and be all pre-N. America-visiting Europe in your snatching at wispy memories of pre-Christian fire-rituals and skull-cults.
You make carving turnips sounds so alluring, I might give it another go. As a child my parents WOULDN’T LET me carve a pumpkin, had to be a much more difficult and boring-looking turnip, in some cruel attempt at preserving creepy englishness. They do look a lot like shrunken heads after a while though, if you keep ’em hanging around.
tip o’lanterns! thank you for such a great new word (and mental image)!
in re: seasonal gourds, please everyone see this. Immediately.
http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/its-decorative…
(I mean, I’m sure you already have, but it basically never gets old, I feel)
Guys I just found out that my dental surgery’s been moved from November 1 to October 30. Which means I will be restricted to soft foods during peak candy season. D: D: D: (Related: Does anyone know what happens when you attack Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups with an immersion blender?)
I can only assume the answer is a hilarious mishap.
Add a little milk to them. Call it an energy drink. Voila!
To piggyback on this, blend with ice cream for delicious milkshake times! Not sure whether or not this will also be good for your surgery though.
Just buy it when it’s all on sale, freeze the chocolate, eat it later.
I think you may well be able to just mash them to a consistency you can consume if you don’t want to experiment with peanut butter cup splashback, especially if they’re a little warm/melty.
Did you guys know that Halloween recently passed Easter as the second-most-spent-on holiday? Culture! It changes over time!
ETA: I wonder if that’s wrapping in Dia de los Muertos-related spending? YET ANOTHER THING to add to my “write a grant proposal for this research” list.
Maybe because it is now advertised for 8 solid weeks. The candy displays went up in my supermarket on August 30.
How long until all holidays are advertised continuously through the year? The Holiday Singularity!
I think the grocery store people have forgotten altogether that you’re allowed to go a few weeks here and there without a holiday display of any kind.
More spent on than Christmas? Or is this just candy sales?
If I remember the WSJ article, Christmas remains #1, but Halloween passed Easter for the silver.
I second the “evil clown” idea because HUAAAARRGGH clowns are the fucking worst for the terrifying.
Uh, unless her husband was murdered by clowns or died in a clown related too-many-people-in-a-tiny-car accident. Then do the gourds.
There’s also the thing where you have a scarecrow on your porch/in your yard/whatever for weeks and then on the night of Halloween, actually be the scarecrow and freak everyone out! That could be fun.
My sister’s ex husband used to do this! He’s a great big feller and he’d sit on the bench by their front door in a scary scarecrow costume being very still and looking for all the world like those lifesized “scary” scarecrow guys that aren’t alive. And when the kids get to the door he’d sit up and grab at them. So many tears! I mean children tears, we thought it was hilarious.
He also dressed up as a werewolf for a haunted trail once and one kid was so afraid of him he started throwing rocks at him while screaming “Killer!!! Get away!”
Child fear is the sweetest, purest fear.
I remember being a little girl and going on this ghost train thing – it was terrible, I mean really terrible, it was a dark tunnel with spooky music – and the skeletons jumped out at me and shouted boo and I cried and screamed so ahrd they started panicking and going ‘we’re good skeletons!’ and patting my back and soothing me.
Oh that’s adorable though! I mean I’m sad you were panicking but how sweet of those skeletons!
I am short, ergo not often terrifying (TO MY SADNESS) but at one haunted house/trail I dressed up as a scary doll, complete with really creepy doll mask. I would slouch on this bench like, well, a doll, until someone came by and then I’d jump up and kind of leap/fall in their direction. The saddest thing was a little boy who started crying when he saw me and his parents are giggling and saying “Don’t you want to go hug the pretty doll? Go give her a kiss!” and he’s crying saying “NO! I don’t want to! I hate her!” I felt bad for him and didn’t do my standard jump scare – I just kind of waved politely from my “broken doll on a bench” position. Turns out that’s uh, much creepier and he just cried harder. 🙁
OMG I SHOULD BE A CREEPY DOLL FOR HALLOWEEN!
DO IT. I am (again)! I’m working with what I have, terrifying-wise.
It just made it worse, though! Because they were being so nice but they hadn’t taken their skeleton masks off! and I couldn’t stop crying and I was frightened and embarassed at the same time.
I was about 5 I think?
Letter-writer, you are so sweetly compassionate that I want to hug you in gratitude and bake you a cake. You’re lovely to think of how seeing a gleefully grisly Halloween display might affect your neighbor, and the advice you’re getting here is perfect: steer clear of body horror and death symbols and double down on cats and spiders and clowns and Lovecraftian horrors.
You never know how a newly bereaved person will read your festive Halloween display — or anything, really. Sometimes it’s the dumbest things that register the hardest, maybe because they can sneak in around our defenses. I once ended up sobbing alone on my living room floor while watching the impossibly dumb space-vampire flick LifeForce because [SPOILER, I guess] their victims drained of LIFEFORCE became skeletal jumbles of limbs that all too forcefully* recalled my dearly departed’s final stages of life, when he was just a shambling frame of bones and skin. It was doubly frustrating to be brought to tears by something so completely stupid.
*LifeForcefully, I guess.
I get it, I do. I couldn’t watch Fringe because the way a character in that acts (he’s had memories removed and is forgetful, confused, distressed and often explosively angry) reminds me too hard of how my grandad was before he dies, and also of how my dad is now.
It hurt, and it’s something so silly that you hate yourself a little bit for the hurting.
I couldn’t get into Breaking Bad for the longest time because Walt’s lung cancer reminded me of my Dad’s (totally different type of) cancer.
The first few seasons of Breaking Bad is rooough. My friend recomended it to me and was all like “It’s a teacher who starts cooking meth to support his family!” And days later they see me all mascara-smeary-out-of-tears and was all like, “Riiiight. I forgot to mention his cancer. Sorry about that girl who lost her teacher mother to cancer…” Ugh. Trigger warning your recs people.
I absolutely, 100% lost my shit at an episode of House where a man who’d (they thought) had dementia for years turned out to have something else, which was cured by an injection of Some Medicine Thing. He stood up from his wheelchair and talked for the first time in like a decade, and it was totally ridiculous, and I spent about 4 hours just sobbing about how House wasn’t real and therefore couldn’t fix my mom. And then I felt so, so dumb.
Oh honey that is so not dumb! I remember that episode, and it was really hard to watch even without having that personal connection.
Definitely not dumb, and I’m internet-hugging you so hard right now. I’ve had that exact same reaction to a (different) episode of House.
This seems like a safe space to admit that when I see/hear the term “memento mori” I picture Maury Povich looking at a bunch of post-it notes.
(Great advice guys, and what a nice LW).
Well that’s what I will be picturing, NOW.
Heheheheh…. I didn’t before, but I will now!
Maury Povich covered in post-it notes (perhaps saying: “He is NOT the father.” “Connie is your wife. You can trust her.”) would make a great highbrow Halloween costume that exactly zero people would actually get. “I’m a memento mori.” “Wha? Looks guys, she’s a sexy post-it note factory!”
Really great advice, and Nicole, thanks for throwing in the bit about leaving a casserole. Food is definitely the most thoughtful way to help someone in grief (or someone who’s just had a baby.) A friend once brought me vegetarian noodle soup during a time of stress and it was the only thing I could get down for days.
If you’re into baking Halloweeny stuff as much as decorating (my preferred method of celebrating), some festive cookies or something with a note would also probably be appreciated.
Ugh I just love this letter so much. You’re so sweet.
Food really is the sweetest, even if you don’t need it. One time when I was in high school and my dad was hospitalized, a neighbor we didn’t know too well knocked on the door and said, “I made too much dinner. I heard you were having a rough week, maybe you guys could help me out by taking these extras?” and there was a full, piping hot meal in a disposable container. Dude clearly didn’t just accidentally make too much as we were a family of 4 and his was a family of 5, but it was so, so sweet. Nearly 20 years later, my mom still loves the man just for that gesture alone.
It just made it worse, though! Because they were being so nice but they hadn't taken their skeleton masks off! and I couldn't stop crying and I was frightened and embarassed at the same time.
I was about 5 I think?
DO IT. I am (again)! I'm working with what I have, terrifying-wise.
tip o'lanterns! thank you for such a great new word (and mental image)!
What a lovely, caring letter writer. And such good advice! High fives all around.
Oh god, I love the shit out of that article, thank you for bringing it back into view in such a timely manner.