Lazy Deaths

Why so many of us can't imagine disabled people having happy endings.

(Content Note: This is a Disability Day of Mourning post, so there will be some mentions of filicide.)

As the Disability Day of Mourning nears, I'm thinking about who lives and who dies in the stories we tell.

I'm thinking about a movie I watched with my family as a tween. My brain is telling me it was South Pacific, but I just looked up the plot and confused myself, so I'm not going to say it was definitely that movie. It was an old movie in a jaunty wartime setting, without showing much actual war, and near the end, a character who had gotten into a fairly complicated personal situation ended up dying unexpectedly for war reasons before he could sort any of it out. (The character was an able-bodied, straight, white man. I'm not talking about disability yet.) I was weirded out; it seemed like an unsatisfying ending. I asked my mom why he'd died.

"Well," she said, "at that point, he wasn't going to have a happy ending anyway."