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Regarding the fact that I asked LabRat to please not ask Carol to stop posting here, I can now see that LabRat was simply paraphrasing some rules that these boards have. I hadn't read those rules (my bad) and I'm sorry if what I said came out as an attack, LabRat.

Hasini, real death is a permanent thing. It may not be permanent for the deceased person, who may move on to other worlds, other existences, but it is permanent for those left behind on the earth, because the person who has died is taken away from them.

She couldn't. But she is going to find out that he isn't. He is going to come back to her. And then his supposed death is going to dissolve like mist in the morning, being replaced by the solid reality of his warm and living body and his eyes smiling at her and his arms encircling her.

Being told that a loved one is dead creates a horrible moment. But it's not the moment that's the worst thing. The worst thing is waking up the next morning and remembering: he is dead. And waking up the morning after that, and remembering: he is dead. And waking up the third morning and remembering... and the fourth... and the fifth... and the sixth... and the one thousand three hundred and fortieth.... That is not the same thing as being told that a loved one is dead, experiencing a horrible moment, and waking up for perhaps quite a few mornings and remembering that he is dead, but then finding out that, no indeed, he isn't. He is alive and well and he has come back to me.

The little fic about the woman and her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren came to me precisely because this woman couldn't tell the difference between the moment of death and the ongoing reality of death. To her the moment of death is so permanent that having her loved ones back after they have been presumed dead, touching their warm bodies, seeing them live their lives, doesn't change her perception that they are dead. Because she has once been told that they are dead, and then they stay dead to her forever.

Another possible twist on the story of the woman who couldn't tell the difference between the moment of (supposed) death and the permanence of real death is the woman who is told that her children are dead, but since she got one of her children back, she firmly believes that the other one is alive, too. Seeing and touching the cold, stiff body of her dead child isn't going to change that. Burying her dead child isn't going to change that. If she can't see her dead child, she is going to make herself a lifesize doll representing her dead child, and then she is going to treat the doll exactly like she treats her living child: feed it, bathe it, potty-train it, carry it outside so it can play, enroll it in school (and home-scool it if her application is turned down), etcetra.



Because the woman who came to me in this story couldn't tell the difference between the moment of supposed death and the unrelenting permanence of actual death. And it seems to me that such a view of (at least fictional) death underlies the idea that TOGOMs and deathfics are the same.

Ann