What I think about when people say bless you

I was speaking to a mate a while back about Murakami’s What I talk about when I talk about running and how it had a big impact on him when he first read it. And when he revisited it more recently, it fell a bit flat and didn’t spark the same flames as last time. But it got me thinking and so a new series is born. Read the first story in the series here.

Bless me? Bless you! I don’t need a blessing, I don’t want a blessing, I’m fine if you just want to ignore my sneeze. Bless the rains down in Africa if you want but we don’t need to draw any more attention to my sneeze and you certainly don’t need to bring god into another conversation. Separation of church and achoo is important to democracy. 

Aside from sleeping, humans are at their most vulnerable while sneezing – it’s like a little anatomical flash-bang grenade going off in your chest exploding up your throat into your head. Because what is a sneeze if not a cross between a cough and getting kicked in the chest by a horse. A huge convulsion that, as we all remember from primary school, creates so much pressure it would force your eyes to explode out of your head if we were able to keep our eyes open, which we also remember, is impossible. So while our eyes are slammed shut by the explosion in our lungs bursting out our mouths, we’re incredibly vulnerable to attack. And that’s when they strike. The Blessers.

You know what I really want in the disorientating although sometimes quite enjoyable post-sneeze stupor? A smug face ghoulishly emerging from the haze to bless me. I’ve just survived a physiological atom bomb, the shock wave contorted my face beyond recognition, a grimace tore across my mouth before it blew a kiss into my hand, my cheeks huffed out like a Puffer Fish doing an impression of Louis Armstrong, and my eyebrows, assuming they’re still attached, did something weird, I’m sure. So what makes you think I want to prolong this indignity? “Bless you, I saw what you did and frankly it was abhorrent. I’ve worked in morgues for two decades and yours was the most godless face I’ve ever seen. Never sneeze in my presence again and seek god immediately.”

Blessing a sneeze takes someone’s involuntary bodily function and makes it about you in a profoundly outdated way. Do you know where the bless you tradition comes from? Do you know what started it all? The Bubonic Plague. You can probably guess. Sneezing was considered a symptom of the plague and so bless you was offered as a benediction for your imminent death. This is just one origin story and the most compelling. So, when a sneeze meant you were probably going to die in a horrid very leaky way, bless you seems like a nice gesture, if entirely futile and more for the Blesser’s benefit. The real tragedy of the plague of course is that the first generation of Blessers weren’t the last. Surely if you’re close enough to witness and bless a sneeze during the Bubonic Plague, you’re in the contagion zone? Apparently not, what a shame.

The lower-end estimate for the number of people killed by the Bubonic plague is 75 million, versus around 4 million for Covid-19. So it took 75 million funerals to make the bless you trend go viral for 600+ years. Think of how far six centuries of medical and scientific advancements have taken us in understanding anatomy, virology, and the mundanity of the sneeze. Sure, it’s effectively spitting into the air while also shouting through your nose, but it’s unlikely your sneeze will kill 75 million people. I wonder how many people have been killed over the same 600 years in the name of your blessing god?

But sneezes haven’t been considered a precursor to death for a very long time. So you blessing me is wild overkill. Hollywood movies still use sneezes as a tool for showing someone’s coming down with some kind of illness, which has never rung true for me – if I’m sick my sinuses are usually fuller than a bag of porridge. Of course Covid re-spooked the sneeze and it was enough to make people balk and speculate about your vaccination status. But usually, a sneeze is just a banal nasal irritation, nothing to worry about. Certainly, nothing to justify invoking a blessing from your god. And if a global pandemic with a particle-born virus wasn’t enough to realign sneezing and death, nothing will. Which suggests it’s time to bury Bless you in the annals of history.

I count my blessings every day that I didn’t grow up in a bless you house, and those blessings add up to zero, which is the closest whole number to how much I need you to bless my sneeze on a scale of 0 to 75 million. When someone blesses you, they’ve forced you into a two-part social contract. Like someone holding the door open for you when you’re too far away (you best get shuffle-running you rude bastard), a kid saying “Knock knock”. No! The closest comparison is your dad saying, “Pull my finger”. That’s what I think about when you say bless you. I think about having to pull Dad’s finger knowing that whether I do or not, he will laugh before farting in my immediate vicinity.

You have two options when someone blesses you, you can ignore it, which even I can admit is quite rude and you can pretty reliably guarantee they’ll just say it again if you ignore the first blessing. You can play it straight and say thanks with the same kind of pulled-back-flat-lip, eye-squinting fake smile you throw out when you pass a stranger in a narrow corridor. But there’s only one truly effective way to terminate this unwanted social contract but it’s rare (unless someone’s just thrown chili flakes into hot oil) and requires a double sneezing incident. You don’t reciprocate. There are fewer pregnant pauses more exhilarating than after a blesser has blessed you, then they sneeze. They will look at you like a puppy in the pound, imploring you with wide-eyed desperation. They stop short of begging, probably, but you both know what they want. And that is the only way to terminate the bless-you contract. The only way to rebalance the sneeze spreadsheet. One in, one out. One up, one down. One to heaven, one to hell. A ring, a ring, a rosie. A pocket full of posie. A tissue, a tissue, we all fall down.