Being in your late 30s can be challenging. You’re ten years too late and a thousand accomplishments short of joining the 27 club. You notice gray pubic hair, varicose veins, and find out Megan Thee Stallion is eight years younger than you. The worst part is realizing kids born in 2004 can legally drink in the same bars as you do. A sense of panic sets in when you realize life’s best years were wasted on younger, more ungrateful versions of yourself, but don’t fret.
While you were contemplating shopping for discount headstones on Temu amid your existential crisis, something glorious happened. The hosts of a popular true crime podcast just called a 38-year-old murder victim “young” and “attractive.” But wait, it gets better. The woman in question who suffered blunt force trauma, petechial hemorrhaging, and internal decapitation was also said to have had “her whole life in front of her.” I hope they’re not just saying that to be nice.
While the crime was unspeakably brutal, the description of the victim as “sprightly” and “naive” was a win for women everywhere in their mid to late 30s. It just goes to show that life doesn’t end at perimenopause, unless of course you run into the I-87 butcher and become the latest victim in a long string of grisly murders dating back to the 1980s.
Sure, it sounds brutal to die mercilessly at the hands of a sadistic serial killer, but we can take comfort in knowing how many people were touched by hearing someone of her big age referred to as “a young woman in the prime of her life.” I must have rewound that part 15 times. Hopefully, her friends, family, and the restless fragments of her tortured soul still earthbound to her murderer’s torture dungeon will see the silver lining in all of this.
The next time someone says you’re too old for an internship, a nose ring, or glitter eyeshadow, remind them about Sharon Kinney; the 38-year-old murder victim regarded as a “vivacious young woman” in some podcast circles. Let her death not be in vain, as she serves as a beacon of hope for those approaching 40 who would also like their desecrated corpses to be remembered as “spring chickens whose lives were cut short.”