Pet Sematary (Sometimes, Dead is Better) – Josh Hatcher
“The soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can and tends it.”
Jud Crandall – Stephen King’s Pet Sematary
Growing up like most kids in the 80s and 90s, I had an obsession with Stephen King. He would write these great stories. A group of average kids, or a family living a normal life in a small town would have an encounter with darkness or have to do battle with evil.
Those ragtag groups of kids, those small New England towns remind me very much of of adolescence in Roulette, PA, and the adventures and stories we saw.
Growing up in a small town like mine you knew about the dark secrets.
The guy who murdered his mom and dad with an axe.
The guy who hung himself in our barn.
The prominent men in town who had been rumored to have gang-raped a teenage girl sixty years ago. (she later killed herself.They are all dead now)
Once, a “snowbird” was at his summer cabin, and a man named “Snake” had killed him with an axe in his garage. Before they had a suspect, just a week after the murder, my buddies and I camped in the woods behind the cabin. You could see it through the trees.
I recently watched the original Pet Sematary movie. (I haven’t seen the new one yet.)
A character named Jud Crandall (played by Fred Gwynne, aka Herman Munster) utters in a Maine accent, “Sometimes dead is better.”
I won’t spoil the whole thing if you’ve never watched it – but that line is haunting.
Over your course of #RiseXUp We’ve been encouraging you to RISE UP and COME ALIVE to take back your life, and to start over.
But you know full well that there are some things that should stay dead. Things that men should not do. Things that you should not embrace. Things you should never go back to.
It’s a BAD IDEA to put that cat in the Micmac cemetery because it’s going to come back. And it’s going to be a mess.
Sometimes dead is better.
It’s not a good idea for you to send your ex girlfriend a text message or a snap asking her how she’s doing, while your wife is sleeping in bed next to you.
Sometimes dead is better.
It’s not a good idea to go hang out at the bar when you’re striving for sober. Chances are that alcohol is going to have a siren’s call, and you’re gonna hear it loud and clear.
Sometimes dead is better.
It’s not a good idea to dig up the past and hold it against someone you love – because resentment not only kills a relationship, it eats you from the inside out.
Sometimes dead is better.
If you’ve got trauma that you’ve worked hard to overcome, but you keep reopening the wounds as you turn once again to your old coping mechanisms that you’ve used for years, drugs, food, porn, rage… you’ve got to be vigilant because…
Sometimes dead is better.
If you come from an abusive past where your parents didn’t show you the kind of love a kid should be shown, you’ve got to cut ties with that, so that your kids never know it. You’ve got to make a solemn vow, and break the curses, so that they never have to endure what you did.
Sometimes dead is better.
And even when you make that vow, but you find yourself repeating the mistakes of your fathers and grandfathers, you’ve got to break the chains again, and stop the cycle, because…