Maybe this might assist Grahame... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Saturday, March 19, 2011, 21:55 (795 days ago) @ desi

Grahame, you seem to have a very difficult time appreciating the emotions of other people. From what I've read it seems something very similar to if not Asperger's Syndrome — which I am sure you will have heard about but if you haven't Wikipedia has a very good discussion on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asperger's_Syndrome .

Twice a year you come into whatever discussion forum you are presently active on, or welcome in, and write a moving post about the death of your son and the death of your first wife on the anniversary of their deaths. I don't think I have met another individual who so persistently remembers deaths in quite the manner you do. In some ways it is very touching. Many others in this place though have had various kinds of losses of people whom they have dearly loved. I don't know anyone else who persistently recalls the anniversaries of their loved one's deaths in quite the way you do. What I wrote about in the long post you are commenting on is, in a sense, a form of "unresolved grief". I hadn't really thought of it like that until you used the term but I lost virtually everything. I am still "getting over a lot of that" — still resolving in a sense what happened in my life and how that has changed/is changing my core religious beliefs and spirituality.

I suspect it might be like water off a duck's back to yourself — as Aspies seem to have difficulty in understanding when someone is giving them shit, or taking the mickey out of them, as much as they don't understand when they serve up objectionable or inappropriate responses in social situations[1] — but what if I responded every year when Grahame Fallon "remembers his first wife and son" with something like this:

Get over your "unresolved grief", Grahame. Can you bloody-well shut up about your son and your first wife. We all know their story and how deeply it affected you, but we're sick to death of hearing about it like some broken record. You didn't mention Jesus, the Buddha, Teilhard de Chardin, the "Total Christ", the "Cosmic Christ", "Cosmic Christology", "Christic Cosmology", Pope Benedict, Alfredo Ottaviani, the Monitum, Humanae Vitae, The Theology of the Body, Hope or whatever in the 556 words you used (or however many it was and I meticulously counted every single one of them) to express your "unresolved grief" over the loss of your son and your first wife.

I'd be interested to know how you would feel if I responded like that? Is that an inappropriate question to ask you? Do you find it in any way offensive? Would you feel offended if I, or another poster, responded to you when you were writing about some "unresolved grief" like the death of your son and your first wife, in a similar way to the indented paragraph above?

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[1] See: "Asperger syndrome and interpersonal relationships"

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]