A bit different from your typical heartbreak story, but one time that has stuck with me over the years, surprisingly, was when I overheard two of my acquaintances from middle school arguing. I remember it painfully well:
A: B, If you don't stop right now, then I'm gonna tell your daddy on you!
B: Joke's on you, my dad's in heaven.
A: How do you know?
I mean, I'm not even religious and I know that A said what they did without thinking, but...wow, it just hit me really hard. I remember when B's dad died--it was in a car wreck; B survived, their father did not--and it was one of the few times that I've ever really felt sad when someone else's relative died. I don't exaggerate when I say that I literally flinched after hearing A's comment. :(
I had an old friend tell another friend "you're lucky you don't have parents," after being told to do something he didn't want to do by his own parents.
My friend always joked about his parents being dead, and we'd often do it too in good spirit (he'd laugh really hard and bounce off of it), but this kid was 100% serious, and he could tell. It really got to him, because he felt that being told to take out the trash, or whatever, was more painful than having his parents die.
A bit different from your typical heartbreak story, but one time that has stuck with me over the years, surprisingly, was when I overheard two of my acquaintances from middle school arguing. I remember it painfully well:
A: B, If you don't stop right now, then I'm gonna tell your daddy on you!
B: Joke's on you, my dad's in heaven.
A: How do you know?
I mean, I'm not even religious and I know that A said what they did without thinking, but...wow, it just hit me really hard. I remember when B's dad died--it was in a car wreck; B survived, their father did not--and it was one of the few times that I've ever really felt sad when someone else's relative died. I don't exaggerate when I say that I literally flinched after hearing A's comment. :(
I had an old friend tell another friend "you're lucky you don't have parents," after being told to do something he didn't want to do by his own parents.
My friend always joked about his parents being dead, and we'd often do it too in good spirit (he'd laugh really hard and bounce off of it), but this kid was 100% serious, and he could tell. It really got to him, because he felt that being told to take out the trash, or whatever, was more painful than having his parents die.
We stopped talking to him not long after that.
Really makes you think about how you should appreciate what you do have, doesn't it?