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I think that I have read at least 15 posts on my FList today regarding Falwell's passing.  Most are joyous celebratory posts, if tinged with the slightest bit of venom.   A couple were more thoughtful, and a couple more were simply news stories.

I have been trying for the last 10 hours or so to try and figure out how I feel about this.  I don't feel happy.  I don't feel celebratory.  I feel ... shocked.  It's kind of like when you are pushing against something so hard, and when it is suddenly removed, you fall on your face.  You sit up dazed for a moment wondering what the hell just happened.  I think that is where I am at now.

I don't see death as a bad thing.  Or as a good thing.  It is just something that happens.  And it happens to us all.  The fact that someone dies isn't usually reason for grief for me (unless I will miss the departed greatly), it doesn't strike me as any kind of punishment for misdeeds.  Death, for me these days, just leaves a strange hole and a weird sense of nostalgia.

That said, the manner in which one dies can occasionally be a punishment, but for those who truly deserve it, the release of death is more mercy than they should have.

I didn't like Jerry Falwell, and I don't wish him happiness in the afterlife.  I don't wish anything to him at all.  I think that he will end up passing from my mind and my life as if he never existed in the first place.  I am releasing his memory to time.  I hope that in a few years time, I won't even recognize the name.

I do, however, find delicious irony in the fact that Fred Phelps is planning to picket Falwell's funeral.  That makes me giggle.  (If anyone deserves my venom, it is Phelps.  That is a man I would celebrate the death of.  His life and deeds should be rewarded by him being beaten to death by the bare hands of his own battered family.  I think his wife should get to use a baseball bat.)

Thus ends Jerry Falwell.  May he and his influence pass into obscurity.

--Phae