I recently read the conversation Alexandra started about offensive
platitudes people sometimes give to people who've just lost a person
or animal to death.

Another prime situation for that sort of thing is when someone learns
you have just received a terrible diagnosis. When I told a masseuse
about my breast cancer diagnosis 12 yrs ago, and expressed my terror,
she said something like

      It will make you a better person to go through it.

I was ready to shoot her, but I was already on her massage table, and
it would have been really messy.

Often people really don't know what to do or say. Their defenses can
produce such f@kd up responses.

A couple of other people immediately launched into horrific tales of
the torments and death someone they knew or had only heard of had gone
through.

After a while, I saw the whole thing like a gigantic Rorschach test.

[Posted in FML 7423]