Are we faultless in death? A reflection after Dear Evan Hanson.

Are we faultless in death?

Recently, I watched the musical Dear Evan Hanson live with a few amazing friends. Brilliant though it was in musical and theatrical production, it left me with questions that lingered even after I got home that night. I found myself thinking about the death of Connor, and the strangely reverent way the living orbited around his absence.

In the show, Connor isn’t exactly a saint. In fact, he’s the polar opposite. He’s presented as an unapologetic pot addict, as a mean-spirited, violent brother, as an angry, ill-tempered classmate. Zoey mentions that Connor would try to beat down her door when she was in her room, and genuinely believes that she is better off without the Connor that she knew. But suddenly, after his death, the people around her start searching for clues, for implicit signs that he was better than they had remembered. His mom clings desperately to Evan’s invented stories about the gentle, caring Connor that stayed with Evan when he broke his arm, a carefree, lackadaisical Connor that would laugh and trade stories with a friend for hours. This fabricated image is what keeps her going, hoping against hope that there was indeed a gentler Connor hidden somewhere underneath the boy she had always known. 

This made me wonder why we seem to make people spotless once they’re gone. It seems as if death acts like some magical eraser that erases one’s flaws. The question remains - Are we faultless in death? Why does death command an obligation to focus only on the better side of one’s character, even if they didn’t share that goodness in the living? It reminds me a bit of how, in Hamlet, King Hamlet becomes idealised as a god-like, heroic, “titan god”, “so excellent a king” - even though it’s an unmistakable exaggeration: we never really see this perfection for ourselves. Similarly, in Colossians 1:22 in the Bible, Catholics are indeed presented as “holy, faultless and blameless” before God in death. Do the dead become easier to love when we can edit out their flaws?

In the musical, the song Requiem in Act 1 captures this feeling perfectly. Zoey sings: “Why should I have a heavy heart? Why should I start to break in pieces? Why should I go and fall apart for you?”

It’s an honest, raw take on something we are unwilling to voice. It’s an uncomfortable truth, that sometimes the person who died wasn’t easy to love when they were alive, and grief doesn't automatically fix that history, nor does it make them a better person. What I think is that maybe the faultlessness - the “requiem” - we give the dead isn’t really about them at all, but it’s about what we the living need to believe so we can keep on living.