Gossip is the devil’s telephone

I, like many, was heartbroken to learn of Catherine O’Hara’s passing at the young age of seventy-one. I was also disappointed to learn of the gossip that rippled from the questions people had about her death.

She was so frail. She’s super skinny, I guess she wasn’t ok! She had that weird heart thing; maybe it was that?

In the aftermath of her death, the way people discussed Catherine O’Hara’s last days made something really clear to me: even some of the most well-intentioned people still don’t know how to talk about health in a way that preserves our dignity. People made many assumptions about how and why Catherine O’Hara passed away. They blamed her weight, her age, her life choices. Perhaps she was just caught shopping at the blouse barn. This tactless dissection of physical health feels all too familiar. As a disabled person, I find that these body audits happen in the day-to-day life of everyday people, just less publicly than for those who live in the limelight. People often ask questions that sound a lot like subtext: “Well, what are you doing to yourself to make your health so fragile?”

I find that people are very comfortable talking about my body as if it is completely separate from me. My hyperextended joints are “disgusting,” but I’m not disgusting. I’m so brave, but you’d want to die if you had to live that way. There’s a cognitive dissonance in the way many discuss me as a person versus my disability, but I don’t get the privilege of separating them. And when you bring up that disparity? People tell you to stop being a disgruntled pelican and let it go.

Recently, I texted a friend after a particularly rough couple of days with my joints not wanting to cooperate.

“Thank you for being someone who doesn’t make a spectacle of me being hurt.” When I showed up in a sling, people asked well-meaning questions, but it could feel overwhelming to answer them again and again. Being told to “get well soon” didn’t feel very promising when my genes begged to differ.

In the past few years, I’ve also lost weight. I thought it would feel good when people commented on my body, but it felt icky in a way I have trouble describing. Maybe it’s a feeling of being monitored without knowing. Are people talking about it behind my back? Silently judging? I knew people were perceiving my body; we can’t help but do that. But I became hyperaware of the fact that they were perceiving my body in the context of my disability.

“I hope you’re feeling good now!” someone said after we talked a bit about my weight loss. Ironically, my health has been worse than ever, but doctors are finally taking me seriously because they can’t just tell me to lose weight and come back. There’s this assumption that losing weight is good, oh wait, until it’s not good, and we blame someone’s death on it. There’s this razor-thin edge that no one could possibly walk. Before you talk about someone’s body, think about why you care in the first place. Are you concerned for their health? Projecting your own ideas onto them? Looking for something to gossip about? Is your curiosity for my benefit, or is it to soothe your own discomfort with the reality of a body that functions differently?

Next time you think about commenting on someone’s body, take some advice from Moira Rose herself: “Gossip is the devil’s telephone. Best to just hang up.”