I remember being in a local Halloween funhouse hours before I got the call about Jim, struggling to understand why people would pay money to stumble around in the dark and be frightened.<\/p>\n
The “Halloween” series of hack ’em slash ’em movies never\u00a0appealed to me. I had enough nightmares of my own imagination.<\/p>\n
On October 31, 1987, my favorite cousin, Leo, was killed in a car wreck in Hawaii. He was a\u00a0central character for me among dozens of cousins, someone who had always made me laugh, someone I was friends with even outside of family reunions.<\/p>\n
Leo died when he\u00a0was 30 years old. I remember writing to my aunt and uncle with a sense of disorientation. How could I be writing a sympathy card about Leo to his parents? How could a spirit so bright just vanish into darkness?<\/p>\n
At the time, I’d been married for three years, and I was in a different kind of funhouse, described\u00a0by Bruce Springsteen’s “Tunnel of Love<\/a>“:<\/p>\n Then the lights go out and it’s just the three of us More dark times were ahead in that funhouse, ending with a separation the following year and finally divorce.<\/p>\n Halloween is in the season of fall, a time when the shortening days and dying leaves give many people a sense of melancholy and loss. For me, autumn\u00a0was welcome, a time when the outdoors\u00a0matched what I felt inside myself.<\/p>\n The holiday continued to seem macabre, and getting worse all the time with increasingly gory and graphic costumes – people with axes stuck in\u00a0their heads, eyeballs that drooped from their rubber sockets. Coupled with all the drinking and driving that went on during this holiday, I decided it was better to ignore it and stay home.<\/p>\n But one Halloween, when I was single and living on Capitol Hill in Seattle, some friends talked me into going out. The neighborhood celebrated Halloween in a big way, led by a veritable parade of gay men who took the opportunity to show off their style with outrageous costumes.<\/p>\n We stopped at a restaurant. Our waiter was a young man wearing a pink woman’s suit, and a pink pillbox hat with what looked like pieces of brain sprayed all over it.<\/p>\n We looked at him in puzzlement. “Jackie Kennedy,” he explained.<\/p>\n That was the last straw. From then on, I banished Halloween. There is enough death in the world without invoking it on purpose.<\/p>\n Every year, 40,000 people in the United States\u00a0commit suicide.<\/a> That’s one person every 13 seconds. It is the 3rd\u00a0leading cause of death<\/a> among 15- to 24-year-olds; 1st is accidents (mostly in cars), 2nd is homicide.<\/p>\n For Day 117, I have a bent, mangled and scraped up penny from 1995 that we found today in the jeep. A match for how I feel about this holiday.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On October 31, 1976,\u00a0I\u00a0got the worst news of my 17-year-old life: My boyfriend, Jim, had died after a car wreck. He’d been driving drunk and ran a stop sign. He was my first lover, and sobbing in front of his casket I knew that God had punished me for my sins. A popular song at … read more Why I hate Halloween<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[418,90,421,105,417,420,419,98],"class_list":["post-6071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-418","tag-90","tag-costumes","tag-death","tag-halloween","tag-jim","tag-leo","tag-seattle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6071"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6091,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6071\/revisions\/6091"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6071"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6071"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6071"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nYou me and all that stuff we’re so scared of<\/p><\/blockquote>\n![\"Day](\"http:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/10\/Day-117-1995-1024x702.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n