When Molly died on A Country Practice, my sister and I weren’t allowed to watch the end of the episode. Our parents thought we were too young and impressionable to see something so sad.

WHY WERE THEY NOT HERE LAST NIGHT? Thirty-nine is young and impressionable!  I needed them to send me to my room – banning me from losing Patrick in a similar manner!  Gah!  The tears…

Actually, I fib. I didn’t shed one tear. Not one.

That’s how upset I am. I don’t cry at funerals, either. I spring into action. I become Suzy Homemaker and start baking.

A friend started baking last night.  She baked pikelets and made a cup of tea, then read the caption on the tea bag, which said “I’ve left you temporarily. Stay Strong (like this tea)”, then posted a pic of the tea and pikelets on Facebook with the caption: “So devastated about Offspring had to make pikelets… and now Patrick is talking to me through my tea! May also have to boycott Channel 10. — feeling incredulous.” and a sad face.

Facebook needs to revise its emoticons because there isn’t one distraught enough to accurately convey how it feels when your favourite fictional character accidentally walks into a slow-moving car en route to his partner’s baby shower, having already lost his first baby and having finally, FINALLY sorted out his drug addiction and checkered relationship (ably assisted by the beautiful counsellor, Lawrence).

If only he’d been wearing a bear on his head!! It might have saved him! (and given us once last visual to see us through our grief…)

My husband has the flu (the real one) and slept in the other room.  He staggered into our bedroom in the pitch dark at 6am and instead of asking him how he feels I said ‘Patrick’s dead.’

Too blunt?

And you know what he said? (I hope it’s the fever, otherwise what have I married?) He said this:

“Whoop-dee-doo.”

Argh! I can hardly type!

I blame my uni friend’s sister for all of this. She was the very first girlfriend of Mathew Le Nevez at Telopea Park Primary in the 80s. If only she hadn’t so irresponsibly let him slip through her fingers (he dumped her unfortunately, but I refuse to believe it was his fault because he’s Patrick) then he wouldn’t now have an American girlfriend, and might not be so tempted to build a career in the States, forcing Offspring’s hapless writers to murder him so brutally at such a crucial, crucial moment in our TV-viewing lives… (not that there would ever have been a good time).

And y’know – to the haters (I’m looking at you, man who I married, whose own uni mate is Richard Glover, partner of Debra Oswald, writer of Offspring – and even then we couldn’t save Patrick) I’ll say this:

It’s just a TV show.

It is.

There is real tragedy in the world and on our screens constantly. My family is dealing with a personal story of heartbreak at the moment.  Yesterday, a friend found out that her aunt has three months to live at fifty-four. The toddler who was best man for his parents on the weekend, died of leukemia.  Two brothers were strangled to death by a python at a sleepover.  The Ohio Kidnapper’s house was demolished.  People starved to death, were shot, bombed, murdered, drowned seeking asylum and died of hideous, hideous illnesses.

Our hearts are broken in real life, every single day, and one way that we numb ourselves from the pain is by escaping into fictional worlds, falling in love with make-believe characters and becoming completely engrossed in their lives, thanks to brilliant writers (who occasionally make a mistake so catastrophic that they may never be forgiven).

It’s not new. People have escaped into storytelling as a self-preservation measure since the dawn of time…

Back when cavemen hunted bears, slung them over their naked torsos and dragged them home to their women-folk…

Sob!

I need a cup of tea.