Desensitized, Inspired by Lu Hsun's "Death"

                In the culture I have grown up in, death, real or fake, constantly around me could very well have desensitized me to the calamity of the event. I won’t start preaching about the negative effects of violent video games; though I do believe those effects can be very real depending on the person. I won’t muse on the fact that so many wars and movies depicting wars and stories by relatives about wars have made war seem like a normal thing, so that it isn't devastating like World War I was when it was first announced to the populations. I will tell a story.

                Kelly Banfill was a girl who lived down the street from me, six houses exactly. She let me borrow her Harry Potter books to read when I was in seventh grade. I finished the book series faster than she did, and hungered for the seventh book more than she appeared to. The series was the first set of books that truly caught my attentions and sympathies, or at least that is how I remember my experience with them. The books came out a long time ago, so I don’t feel guilty in revealing that many characters die, most of which were beloved to me. Now that I’m thinking, however, I did not cry reading that book as much as I did when the dogs died in Where the Red Fern Grows, but then again the death of animals did always affect me more than the death of humans. What does that say about our society, that the death of human beings just like me was less of a tear jerker than the death of animals that had much shorter life spans anyway? Or maybe it was the reactions to the death of the animals in the various fictions I consumed that got to me?

                Kelly’s dad Jeff Banfill was a second father to me, and I referred to him as such, though normally I’d just shorten it to the familiar “dad.” He died when Kelly and I were in tenth grade, very suddenly by a heart attack at work. They found him in his desk chair the next morning. I learned of this death in the middle of science class. Afterwards, I slammed the palm of my hand into a brick wall and became angrier than I can ever remember being. I have not been a person who cries often since I entered high school, maybe a reaction to my overly sensitive childhood. In the middle of lunch I was biting my lip, deep in thought, when another friend, Lindsay, told me to stop biting it. She was worried I would bite through. The moment my teeth left the pink skin I burst into tears, and was allowed to call my mom. Her, my sister and my nephew made the trip to school to pick me up. The episode frightened my friends, but no more than it frightened me.

                I did not cry much after that scene at school, and at the funeral I was in a constant back-and-forth between standing statue still and shaking like a leaf. I stood next to Kelly the entire viewing, right up front, even when her brother became annoyed and snapped at her that only family should be up there. Kelly lost a father and a foundation, a child like many whose parents had been divorced and not parted amicably. I lost a father figure and the innocent relationship I had with my best friend, and nobody told me when they buried Jeff Banfill that they were also burying my childhood and foreshadowing the death of my one true friendship.

                I would like to say that I am desensitized to death because then death would not bother me, but it did in the stories and it did in real life when Jeff left and it did a month ago when my grandfather passed away. Maybe I should play more video games.