A girl from my school died last night.

Prologue: I know this isn't really the right subreddit to post this in, but there wasn't any really right one. I apologize for that, but I just want to share some things, and see what people think.

First, and most importantly, I'm not looking for sympathy. I just want to explain the situation, my views of it, and what I saw going on at school today. My views might be offensive to you, depending on how easily offended you are. Just a forewarning.

Here's the news story: http://www.krem.com/news/local/Female-falls-from-River-Park-Square-parking-garage-134795543.html (TL;DR: Girl from my high school jumped off of our downtown mall parking garage)

I have two friends that are twins. I'm good friends with one (I'll call him Y for convenience and anonymity), and alright friends with the other (I'll call him X for the same reasons). X was the boyfriend of the girl in this situation (I know they were at least dating at one point; I thought they broke up but today X posted pictures of them kissing from yesterday, so I'll just call them bf and gf for convenience). Obviously, neither of them came to school today. Another friend of mine and I were texting Y to see if X was okay, how he was doing, etc. He's definitely torn up about it, as you could imagine.

X and her, and I believe some others, were together last night. X was with her up until minutes before she died. In a facebook post last night he said that she jumped off of the parking garage, but the news said that she fell. I'm more inclined to believe that she jumped considering the scenario of her death, and that according to X, just beforehand, she said she needed to be alone.

But I spent the entire day talking to people about it, watching how the reacted, and seeing how our school as a whole reacted to it.

To get it out of the way, I did not know this girl. I did know that she was X's girlfriend, but I had never met her. I, personally, did not care about this whatsoever, and didn't really want to talk about it today. My views on this are that it's terrible, but I really don't care to be entirely honest.

However, everybody was talking about this today. The first thing I noticed was that whenever somebody spoke about it, they spoke very quietly. Always in a hushed whisper. Now I initially thought that speaking in such a manner was stupid. Why would they talk quietly? It's not like they're talking about someone and they don't want them to hear it. She's not there to hear it. But I can also understand that perhaps they don't want to spark certain emotions in nearby people by saying anything. So I'm kind of conflicted in that aspect.

I also heard a lot of the usual chatter. "This is terrible," "It's so sad," "Such a tragedy," "My condolences." I also heard the less common "So selfish." Now obviously, this was said thinking that she had committed suicide, which I believe everyone thinks but there is nothing to confirm it. I always get a little angry and conflicted when I hear someone say that suicide is selfish. I can absolutely understand though, that everyone in that person's life will be affected and will feel horrible for quite a long time. But I also get a bit mad because the person saying it is ignorant to the fact that people who kill themselves are seriously troubled, and we should be caring and helpful, and calling it selfish is somewhat criminalizing to the person in question. Just a pragmatic view, at least in my eyes, of how some people might think of it.

There was also the manner of joking [just two really quick stories for the people with a "messed-up" sense of humor before I get into this mini-rant. 1) When texting Y today, he used really poor wording by saying that "shit really hit the floor." 2) In English, we're reading Dante's Inferno, and we postponed reading for a bit because the next section we were going to get into was the circle of hell with suicidal people]. I had said jokingly to a friend of mine today that she should kill herself. She retorted by saying that my joke was especially inappropriate under today's circumstances. I asked why. She said because it's offensive and too soon. Now, I advocate joking about anything, anytime. My reasoning for the offensiveness, is that being offended is pretty much in itself ridiculous; it is essentially being annoyed. But a better reason would be that joking is just that, joking. It is not meant to be taken seriously, nor should it. It does not reflect one's real view on a subject. I love jokes like "Why can't Stevie Wonder read? Because he's black" but I will fight for black people because they're just people, and discriminating against someone for something that is uncontrollable to them is fucking retarded. So being offended by jokes is kind of ridiculous. As for the timing bit, or "too soon," to some, I don't think that really applies either. What is the difference in telling a joke about something between now and a month from now? Nothing, except time has passed. I will admit that telling a joke about it to one of the girl's friends is a bad decision, and that you should not do it. But you should also not do it anytime if they were her friends, regardless of it's now or a month from now, that is not right, but time after the incident should not be a factor. Offensiveness of something shouldn't depend on time after an event.

There were also lots of girls crying today. Not a big deal, that's normal. But I also dislike when people make someone else's death about themselves, which there seemed to be some of today. But I do understand that I'm kind of doing the same thing by merely posting this, so I don't have a lot of room to talk there.

But I just have to say that when someone dies, the thing that frustrates me the most is when people pretend to care. There are people that were friends of hers that will mourn her, and I get that, I hope they'll be okay and everything like that. There's also people like most of my friends and I that didn't directly know her and don't care, so that's fine too. But there's also the people that spend time talking about it, saying that it's horrible, and all that, but who didn't know her. I can't really put it into justifying words, but I just get angry with people like this. People who get extremely sad and depressed with a situation like this and feel the need to show and express their sadness with everyone over someone who was maybe close to someone they knew, but didn't directly know. It's probably because we are continuously bombarded with the news of deaths on TV everyday of people all around the world, our country, our state or province, our city, and even our neighborhood. They don't give a single fuck about almost everyone else they don't know that's died, but when it's just a tiny bit closer to them then they're extremely emotional. I would say that it might just be because they have friends who knew the dead person, but I know some people who cry about random people dying. They're just arbitrarily selective about who they get emotional over, and get offended when I ask them why. I know there are people out there that actually care about every person dying, but the ones I'm talking about just randomly pretend to care to not seem insensitive, and then truly don't give a fuck about other situations that are exactly the same. So a quick way to put it would be, I think it's okay to be sad about someone's death in the sense that we lost a fellow human being, but don't pretend like you knew them directly.

The teachers were, of course, respectful and sensitive to the issue. Same thing as above with some of my teachers that didn't know her. But overall, the school was in a dark, depressive state today. It did go way better than I expected though. It was a very rational "caring but we gotta move on" type mood. And I just wanted to share how our community handles death, and some of my more unpopular criticisms of it.

Please feel free to critique my musings, and share similar experiences of your own. I'd love to talk about anything.