The indecency of others

I am going to take it easy today on my preachy anti-gossip norm. I am worn out after a long week, and yep it is only Wednesday. I have had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. So I don’t feel like thinking too much about writing, because on a daily basis it is brow beaten into my head that I am apparently in some people’s eyes not a good writer. Therefore, here goes with me not caring.

Today I will instead just tell a rumor that was hurtful but hit on a deeper, more sensitive level. This is not a happy story with a funny ending, just so you know. We will be back to our regularly schedule programming next week …

Last year around this time, my sister told me that her boyfriend, (practically my brother-in-law, because he is family to us, so we will call him Bro), was looking for a better job as the one he was in was going south. I looked around where I worked, and within a week had found one and he became my coworker.

My true intentions behind getting him this job were to have him work closer to home so that he could spend more time with my sister. Her health was never good due to a disease called Cystic Fibrosis (seriously, ifyou look at nothing else, please go to that link), and her health had been getting worse over the last couple of years. I knew she would be home over the summer because she was a teacher, and I wanted him to be able to eat lunch with her every day.

Until summer time came, Bro and I would usually have lunch together at work in the break room and just talk. It was nice to connect with him since we didn’t see each other very much. I knew people would talk, and sure enough, I was asked many times whom the new guy I was seeing at work was. As always, I would set the record straight and tell them he was my brother and they shouldn’t always assume the dirty deed.

In early June, just a week before summer break was to start for my sister, tragedy struck. We lost my sister very suddenly as she finally was overtaken by her disease. It was the worst time in my life and in that of my family. My sister was 30 years old, and should have lived into old age, picking on me and arguing with me every day until we were too old and tired to think up quick wit insults for each other.

It was incredibly hard to go back to work after losing her, it was hard to do much of anything, it felt like I had lost half of my heart. The pain for Bro was just as terrible, and was even harder to have him come back to work. When we finally did return to work I would pack both of our lunches and we would again meet up each day for lunch together.

Most of the people in the building knew at that point what had happened and would pass on their condolences.

Unfortunately, there were other whisperings that it is very lucky for people that I didn’t hear until much later. There were rumors going around that Bro and I had started seeing each other or sleeping together.

To say I was disgusted and upset with the situation is a gross understatement of the actual events. I was ashamed to call these people coworkers that they would ever believe such horrible tales.

The dislike of a job should be a reason to want to leave it, not the cattiness of one’s fellow employees.

People are truly hateful that they could make such a tawdry story up out of such heartbreak. What’s worse, I was told this months later by a coworker who had heard it multiple times. However, in telling me this story there was no admittance of denial on their part. There was no “Don’t worry, when I heard that I corrected them and set the record straight.”

No, instead it was just the “Oh yeah I heard that lots of times. Can’t believe you didn’t know that by now.”

Folks, if you are a friend to someone, you don’t even have to be a true friend, just someone who is a decent human being; when you hear something as nasty as that said about someone, and you know it to be false, SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT! Don’t just hear it and guffaw to yourself about someone’s ignorance, stand up for your fellow humankind, especially when someone is going through a hard, horrible time in their life. It is the right thing to do.

Bro no longer works with me, though as much as I miss having him there to talk to each day, I am glad in a way also, because it shuts the rumormongers up at least on that topic.

I miss my sister more than I can explain. I know, as she always did when I would complain to her of a nasty rumor that someone had started, that she would say “People are stupid and you shouldn’t let them get to you.”

It should be just as easy as that.