Written Tragedies.

Grief does funny things to people. It always has, and it’s pretty definitive that it always will. There are cases all over the place. There’s the young widow, who used to shine bright and smile wide, who now stays home and watches the wall above the TV. There’s the wonderful teenage girl whose parents die, and then she starts listening to loud music and going to concerts with drugs and suddenly, no one knows her anymore. There’s the person you never really cared for, but somehow their death makes you look at them differently; you regret things you said to them and every word they spoke now has an ulterior meaning.

And of course, there’s the person that gets driven insane. Whether it’s out of grief or they already were and this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back, no one can say.

Everyone looks better once they’re dead, and maybe it’s because no matter what kind of shitty person they were alive, you don’t just say stuff about dead people. It’s disrespectful to the memory, or whatever. And sometimes I wonder if that’s why no one was given sainthood while they were still alive. See, living people make mistakes, but corpses are perfect.

Grief is a wound, and you know that because you can see there’s a healing process. There’s mourning, there’s acceptance, and there’s moving on. The widow will shake herself awake and meet a nice working stiff in a grocery store. The teenager will land herself in rehab and clean herself up. And you, you’ll go from the graveyard a changed person, because that death affected you in a way that the person’s life maybe never had. It’s just that some never heal. Some just aren’t built to get over it.

They say everything happens for a reason, and when a loved one dies, everyone questions that. Why them? What did they ever do?

They’re not looking at the whole scope of things, obviously. It’s not really about them. It never was. Tear your eyes away from the body and look at the people around you. Look at their tears. They’ve changed because of this. Some of them, they’ve changed for the better. Some of them, they’ve changed for the worse and ever. Most of them will never be the same.

Sometimes a nice big death is enough to shock people awake and make them never take the little things for granted. There’s nothing like death to force people to think of mortality.

In this case, every one of the three boys lined up by the coffin had just that on their minds. Their clothes were black and uncomfortable, and they slouched in them. Each of these boys sat with their arms cross, feet flat on the floor, knees bent at right angles. All three had recently showered; their hair was either wet or copiously gelled, and from the looks of it the latter would have been a remarkably terrible attempt had it been the case. Each boy’s hair was a little longer than his mother’s would have liked. They stared straight forward and didn’t look at anything, especially not the grieving family in front of them, and especially not each other. Their mouths were in firm, set lines, and they would not move without a great effort from the owners, an effort that none of them were willing to give.

It was a car crash, of course. It’s always a car crash with teen deaths, isn’t it? He was never a good driver, and he was probably a little high. Driving down the middle of the road, and the car coming surprised him, he swerved and… well, let’s just say they found him with his brain plastered on the windshield. He was on his way to the party, no doubt.

When the boy in the coffin up there died, he lost a future. Everyone else in the chapel had lost a friend, a family member, a good person. But these three boys, they had lost both.

It sort of went without saying that the band could never go on without him. He gave too much up for it. He founded it, he contributed the most to it. It was his band. How could they keep up his band if he wasn’t there? It was just… wrong, somehow. And in any case, they needed a guitarist. And a writer. Replacing him was a thought that never wandered anywhere near their conscious.

There were sounds of woman sobbing around them, clusters of girls from school leaning on each other, and also the tangible taste of men trying foolishly to be men and holding in their emotions. They knew the dead boy would have hated that, but they all kept their mouths tightly closed.

None of them had really said anything since they were informed. They were at a party, or rather, throwing a party. Celebrating. The parents, they’d rushed in and for once, they didn’t care about all the alcohol. No, the only thing they cared about was grabbing each of their sons, and telling him what had happened, driving him home and reassuring him that the clean up would get taken care of, and no, you won’t be grounded.

All of these boys’ reactions were the same. The silence, and then, just as they were pulling into the driveway, the admission.

“Mom,” all of them said, whispered, breathed. “Mom, we just got signed. We just got signed, today.”

From there, the reactions differed.

“This can’t be happening,” Brent mumbled.

“Any of the rest of us,” Spencer moaned, “Any of us, and it could have worked out.”

“Fuck, I can’t do this without him!” Brendon screamed in front of his Mormon mother.

Each of these exclamations was not about the boy himself, but about the band. Or seemingly about the band. It’s a pack mentality. For a year, all four had lived and breathed the music, and none had inhaled as hard as the dead boy. It was first priority, always. The realization of death would come on much later, when they were face down on their beds and no one was watching them. For one, it would perhaps never come. But right now, the only thing they were thinking of was that he was the one who wanted it the most, who led them and pushed them, and with him gone, they weren’t going anywhere. They weren’t getting signed to anything.

January 13, 2005. The day Panic! at the Disco got signed, the day the boy in the coffin was killed.

Ryan Ross died on the first day of the rest of his life.