Greeting card frustration

I recently tried to buy a greeting card for a friend who was in the hospital. After scanning the row upon row of trite humor and syrupy sympathy I gave up and went home, which is what usually happens when I try to buy a greeting card.

There are whole stores that are devoted to selling greeting cards (and a few other odds and ends associated with giving gifts). They would have you believe that there is a greeting card for every situation: birthday, graduation, wedding, illness or injury, and even death. Cards fall into a few categories: the ones with tasteless or almost tasteless humor, purporting to express something that can only be humorous if it is untrue, and therefore completely irrelevant; the ones with cute animals and fatuous statements; the ones with handsome photos or artistic drawings of the human body; and the ones that are blank. Actually, there are more, but those seem to be the ones I notice.

Each card displays a few key words on the front to make it clear its intent, so a birthday card will start with "This birthday..." and a wedding card will say something like "Congratulations on your wedding" as if to merely say "Congratulations" was not enough for the lucky couple to figure out what it was in regards. This is, of course, because the point of the writing on the front of the card is not so much to express any thoughts to the recipient, but to advertise the purpose of the card to the purchaser. The end result is that the card feels unnatural to the person for whom it is intended.

I inevitably buy the blank cards because, after a sincere effort to find a card that will help me straighten out my thoughts and feelings without actually requiring me to write them myself, I always feel a bit insulted by the simplicity of the commercial cards.

The word greet can mean both to address with some form of salutation and to grieve. This is convenient for the people who manufacture greeting cards, because they create cards not only for happy occasions, like birthdays, but also sad occasions, like the death of a loved one, and disappointing occasions, like injury. Despite the breadth of the occasions, though, there didn't seem to be one card that was appropriate for the one our friend was facing. You see, our friend was in the hospital with the big C. Not the "get well soon" kind, but the kind when the only type of treatment is morphine. The kind when you know the end is coming very soon.

So there I was trying to find a card for when we saw him for what would certainly be the last time. The sympathy cards didn't seem right: I didn't just want to say we were thinking of him. A "Get Well Soon" card would have been insulting. There were cards for when someone has just died, but nothing for someone who was about to die. It was clearly all too immense for the greeting card companies to face. After breaking down in tears, I went home and made a card with a sad face and filled it with my own thoughts about how we were happy we met, that we had become quite accustomed to having him as a friend, and were going to miss him when he was gone. And we do.

Rest in peace Graham.