Lazy Deaths
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
(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."
For some reason this is one of those little moments that sticks in my brain when I think about narratives. I really tried to picture it, you know? I thought about what it would have been like to be one of the writers coming up with this story, trying really to come up with a satisfying ending for this character, exhausting all the options, failing, shrugging, and saying "okay, well, we're in a war, though. We could just kill him."
To be clear, I'm not one of these readers who thinks you should never kill a character. Death is a part of the human experience, and sometimes there are great reasons to kill characters off. Sometimes the whole point of the story is that you're in a situation so dangerous that anybody could die, or that people can choose to sacrifice themselves for the cause, or that you have deep thoughts about death and the grieving process, or that you're writing one of those Christian-inflected Chosen One stories where it feels meaningful for a character to die and return. And so on, and so on. There are lots of good reasons.
But I keep on thinking about the idea of lazy deaths. Deaths where the authors seem to have thrown up their hands and killed off a specific character, not because that’s the most satisfying place for the story to go, but because they've written themselves into a corner and they don't know what else to do with that guy.
Lazy deaths happen to characters who have reached the limits of our cultural imagination. They've gotten themselves into a bad situation, or a really big dilemma, that we can't imagine a good way out of. They're suffering in some way that we can't imagine an end to. Or they've reached some big turning point, but we can't figure out what's on its other side. (This last one happens a lot with redemption arcs. We love to see the moment where a villain decides to turn their life around, but we have no idea how to draw the rest of the fucking owl.)
Characters who have reached these limits aren't necessarily marginalized. The guy from South Pacific clearly wasn't. But characters who are marginalized are going to hit the limits a lot faster, more easily, more often.
And the problem with disabled characters is that a lot of people already can't imagine us having happy endings. We don't have to be having any complicated narrative problem. People hear what our diagnosis is and whoops, there we are, out past the limits of imagination already.
A disabled person can be literally murdered by their caregivers and a lot of people's first instinct is to show the caregivers sympathy. Part of that is because we have weird narratives about how hard it is to be a caregiver (spoiler: it is very hard; spoiler: this doesn't actually justify caregivers doing bad things.) But I think another big part of it, that we maybe don't talk about as often, is this tendency towards lazy deaths. No matter what our caregivers do or don’t do, a lot of people can't imagine disabled people having happy endings anyway. So, why not let us die?
This, I think, is one of the reasons why representation in fiction is so important. Not so that disabled people can see ourselves (although that's important too) but so that able-bodied people can have the limits of their own imaginations expanded. What if everyone did have examples in their heads of what it looks like for disabled people to live fulfilling lives on their own terms? Yes, even that disability, and that one too. Yes, even without any cure.
I also think that, in order to do this, we need to expand our ideas of what a "happy ending" means. It can't always be the classic romance-novel HEA where you have a het marriage, a white picket fence, and 2.5 adorable kids. Many disabled people are capable of these kinds of HEAs - but a lot of disabled people have our own definition of what makes us happy. A lot of us wind up thriving in alternative or countercultural ways. A lot of us aren't always happy - because the world is full of ableism, and because conditions like chronic pain are unpleasant, actually. Nonetheless we have passions, dreams, skills, things to offer, and ways of finding fulfilment with the hands we've been dealt (as well as forms of powerful activism that can change the hands disabled people are dealt in the future).
To be extra-clear: the last thing I want to do is insist that there's only one Politically Valid way to write a disabled story. There are many good and helpful things a disabled story can do. No one story can or should do them all. What I’m describing here - showing disabled people being happy and fulfilled - is only one of them, but it’s an important one.
I really don't think people would let us die, quite so often, if they understood we can be really alive.