Bachelor 19 - Kelsey Poe - Discussion

just2relax wrote:Just sad.  And the obituary says it all. That is not normal. She should have never been accepted on the show.  I'm wondering if Cassie Lambert being home with her baby is resulting in bad casting.

MiaHawk wrote:First, I think it is horrible that Kelsey is receiving so much negativity on social media.

Second, TPTB totally through Kelsey under the bus.  I realize that she signed a contract saying that they could show her in an unflattering light, but what person would think that even they would stoop so low as to exploit the death of a spouse.  Unless you are a super fan (have watched season after season), it would be a reasonable assumption that nobody would take your sharing of the death of your spouse and humiliate you via it.

Third, Kelsey's whole demeanor seems off. I agree with the posters above who commented on how controlled and buttoned up she appears.  At first, I thought of this as her maturity or general personality, but now I think that there is a bit of "detachment" in the way she behaves.  I think that, in order not to break down emotionally with unresolved grief, she has adapted a very matter of fact way of conveying her backstory to others.  I think it is a kind of protective instinct.  If she can hold it together and speak about his death calmly and lay out the facts of his death without emotion, this boosts her sense of control and confidence. I suspect, like many of you, that she still has much healing to do.

Fourth, her use of "story" is an extention of what I said above. I think that by labeling the tragedy of her husband's death as a "story" or "her story" it gives the whole horrible event a tidy little name, a name other than "death", that she can use to refer to that time in her life.  I will share this: When I was in the 4th grade, my father (who owned and operated his own one-man store), was robbed and beaten with the butt of a rifle such that his skull was bashed in, one of his eyes popped out of its socket, one lung collapse, and he was left to die in a pool of his own blood. By the grace of God, a customer walked in and found him and called 911. He was rushed to the hospital and underwent about 12 hours of (neuro)surgery. My mother was told that he may live but be "a vegetable." (At the age of 10, the only definition I knew of "vegetable" was a carrot or a tomato. My older brothers had to explain to me what may lie ahead for our beloved dad.) My father, tough scrapper that his is, made a full and miraculous recovery. Within a month, with a head stitched up and mis-shapen like Frankstein's, he was back to working fulltime in his store. When asked how he could return, he replies: "I had a family to take care of. What other choice did I have?" For a time in the invetigation, my mother was actually considered Suspect #1 in his attempted murder case (just by virtue of the fact that the spouse is always a suspect, I suppose). Dr Henry Lee (now world famous forensic scientist) worked the case, but the case was never solved.  To this very day, whenever my mother talks about this event in our family's history, she refers to it as "your father's accident". It most certainly was not an accident. He was the victim of a brutal crime. But, I think in a way, that by her labeling it as an "accident" it removes (in her mind at least) some of the victimization and helplessness that she (and we) all felt during that horrible time.  Over the years, I even questioned my mother as to why she called it an accident when it wasn't an accident, and she didn't really have a particular reason that she could articulate. I think, in a way, it was also a way for her to move forward and not be so afraid that something like that could ever happen again (when it was definitely possible that my father could be robbed again at work). Our minds are interesting things, and sometimes it just takes a turn of a phrase to allow us to cope with what first appears to be un-copeable.

Her use of "my amazing" story. Yes, she was relaying the story of her husband's death, but in this instance she was trying to share something about who she is as a person. "My" story refers to how she became a widow and how she has been touched by love and loss. "Amazing" doesn't refer to an amazing death or an amazing loss. It is her way of saying that she is choosing to focus on the positive going forward. It did come across as a bit odd when they showed it on tv. Her slow, measured telling of her story seemed a bit off, but I think the delivery was colored by her big attempt to be a bit detached and not become emotional. Her ringing her own bell by calling herself "amazing" for being a survivor of her husband's passing might not have come across well in the diced and spliced episode and it might not be what the average person would choose to say about themselves as a survivor. I don't really have a problem with that, again, because I think that semantics can be very powerful to our own psyches. I'm a self-described "word person" and love to parse what was said and what it all means, but to me I think "amazing" is 90% about boosting up her own psyche and only about 10% about her ego/self-centerness. And compared to Ashley I's 99.9% self-centerness, this particular storyline with Kelsey just doesn't personally bother me too much at all. I was more disturbed by her behavior at the non-cocktail party when she spoke to the other women about being confident about a rose and the scenes of her on the floor (having a panic attack?). But, who knows, maybe all of those emotions that she had kept pushed down all neatly tied in a bow for 18 months suddenly came bubbling up to the surface and she was over-come. I guess I'll just have to wait til next episode and see how it all plays out with her.

Thanks for listening.

twochicklets wrote:Kelsey's editing aside, the obituary scares me.  It is as if he didn't exist prior to her.  Something is very, very off.  Also, she couldn't even remember how he died when she was relating the story.   Yikes.  The other piece that scares me is that she is a child's guidance counselor.