Waves

Sometimes, when I am overwhelmed with grief for those who are missing in my life, I wish I lived in a different society. One in which I was allowed to scream and cry and beat at the ground in the beginning, at the funeral, and get it all out right then, right there. Force and let flow all the pain out of my body at once so I can be done with it and move on, happy to live my life and only look back fondly at the part of my life that included this person.

But then I think, that’s not something that happens at once. A broken leg doesn’t heal in one go; how can I expect a broken heart to do as much?  No amount of wishing will make that so. So then I wish I lived in a society in which it was okay to be in pain, to hurt for years and years, no matter the cause.  To have been able to call in to work this morning and say, I’m sorry I can’t come in today, I need to scream and tear my hair out because my grandmother died two years ago.  I need a day for residual hurt. I'll see you tomorrow.

Facebook and Death

Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and whatever future sites and technologies replace them, we will all be acutely aware when every single person we know dies.

At the moment it's not so obvious. Most of the Facebook generation is young, and the individuals who use these online tools are the ones more likely to be able to afford a computer and so less likely to be living in conditions that make them more likely to die young. (Got that?) But in twenty years or so, when our generation starts heading into late middle age and heart attacks and strokes begin to take their toll, it will become an increasingly regular occurrence to find out, via Newsfeed or Tweet, that someone you once knew passed on. The kids you went to high school with and haven't seen since that reunion. The ex, or the weekend fling, whom you stopped talking to long ago. The former co-worker (the one you flirted with, the one you rivaled with), your former best friend's boyfriend's kid sister, your college professors.

It will be strange, I imagine. It will be the saddest part of our wide-cast net of human awareness. It is easy now - or used to be easier - to travel through life as if walking through woods; your nearby companions are right there with you, and some friendlier acquaintances and more distant relatives are occasionally obscured by the trees and undergrowth, and way off in the distance showing their faces only when crossing a meadow are those folks you only maintain the most casual of contact with. On such a passage, a distant individual might stop appearing for years (or for ever), and you'd never know the difference; they could just have taken a slight detour behind the thickets. Your view allows some knowledge that there is a whole world out there, but it is mainly a personal, close-knit journey.

Thanks to these social connection innovations, the path we take, or will take, will be more like that on a great, flat plain, or maybe inside an infinitely large glass building with see-through tubes and bridges everywhere, or even on the inside of a Ringworld. You can see for miles and miles, and there are a LOT of people out there; only the horizon obscures them from view. If that fellow you friended after talking music tastes with at the bus stop twenty years ago and never spoke to again suddenly drops down dead, you can see it happen even at that great distance; especially because you can see all the people closer to him turning their heads, like rubbernecking on the highway.

As we get older, there will be more and more bodies littering the clearsighted landscape. (In this metaphor, there may still be distant forests in which the older, unconnected generations are walking largely unseen; only the younger generations traverse the vast plain, at least at the moment.) Mortality everywhere. I suspect, and I hope, that it will actually bring us all closer together - if your traveling companions drop off while tramping through the woods with you, you're suddenly alone; but in this wide-open landscape, you can see that way off over there are some other folks looking lonely, and you can cross the distance to join them.

The only question is, as this blogger asks, is if we'll be able to control the social-network announcement of our own deaths. As she points out, an individual might not want to have their Facebook page memorialized or their friends to announce their passing online. Do we have the right - or ability - to take ourselves out of the landscape? As social networks become more prominent, does a person have some (legal or moral) propriety over their cybersphere presence? Most likely, no matter how strenously a person objects, in the near future no one will be able to prevent their online presence.

Stuff to think about. And if you're curious, this article describes the current Facebook policy towards death of a member.

So, to sum up plainly: I think it’s highly likely that in our futures we will remain continually aware of the basic life-status of nearly everyone we ever meet; at the very least we’ll be aware of anytime someone dies. In the past, someone you lost touch with would simply disappear from your sphere of knowledge and you’d probably never find out if they outlived you or not. Thus, we’ll see far more death than any previous generation. But at the same time – I hope – this will ultimately make us less lonely and more connected.

Virtual Gravestone

I've had a lot of discussions recently about the strangely open nature of social networking websites - like Facebook - where almost everyone's personal information is up for grabs. With Facebook in particular, the "news feed" serves as a proverbial pipeline of pictures, messages, articles, and proclamations about our personal lives. Someone has a baby - you've seen pictures and statuses chronicling that experience. Someone gets a new job or fired - it pops up. People show up to their 5th... 10th.... 20th... year high school reunions and no one's surprised anymore. Person A lost 50 pounds, Person B lost his ability to walk, Person C married young and then divorced, but none of it's a shock. So, what happens when someone dies? In a culture where our private lives are on display to (near) everyone, what happens with all that information when a life stops? How does Facebook digest death?

I stumbled onto a blog article through Twitter yesterday posting an e-mail about someone who'd died, her community of friends, and their reactions to her death on her Facebook page. I've taken the liberty of posting it below. Have a read, it's rather moving:

"A few months ago my cousin passed away. At age 28, Amy caught pneumonia and was not able fight off the infection. As the news of her death spread, her Facebook was filled with postings by her friends and family expressing their sadness. Although a couple of her friends have access to her Facebook page and one even (eerily) used it to post a status and add friends posthumously, no one has deleted the account. I looked at it today for the first time since her death and people are still using Facebook to share their important events with Amy and reminisce with each other about all the things they love and miss about her. There are pictures of her being newly added and tagged. One friend even signed up for an account specifically to write on her wall and will be deleting it just as quickly.

Before, we mostly shared our grief with those physically in our vicinity or people emotionally close to us. Now, like everything else, our grief casts a wider net and we share it with more people, more strangers. Also, it feels as if my cousin continues to live in the periphery. I can see what her friends and family are up to, just like I can see what my other (living) cousins extended people are doing. Every post brings her back into focus if only for a moment. While I was not incredibly close to her, through the postings I see more clearly the sort of person she was and all the goodness that a person can be. Her Facebook is her flower and cross on the highway, her Kensington Gardens. I have no idea how long it will last. A few months is such a short time, and the wish that a loved one is still with us can stay for a lifetime.

I'm not sure what this means. I just found it incredibly beautiful and thought I would share it with you. I'm still digesting and get tangled in all the possible words."

As a man approaching his 23rd year, I've been lucky to not have lost many people. To my knowledge, I can't say I've known anyone that has died in recent years; especially, someone young enough to have owned a profile on Facebook. I can't even pretend, or guess, at how the people in the story above are feeling. And, I can't say I've ever thought about what would happen to my profile page if I died tomorrow. I suppose I just sort of assumed that it would fall into disuse, a family member or friend may log on eventually and close it down, and that would be the end of it. Instead, in the story above, family and friends of the dearly deceased flocked to her Facebook page to share memories and condolences. To reminisce and say goodbye. Amy's profile became a virtual gravestone, and while I can't conceive how I would feel about that if it was someone I knew, I can say that this idea is profound to me.

For a concept that supposedly centers around interpersonal connectivity, the internet can be a very selfish place:

"I'll post picture albums to show the world all the fun stuff I do with my friends"

"Here's how I was feeling today"

"Read this article about the cause I fight for because I believe in it, and so should you"

"My day was really crappy""

"I don't believe in privacy settings because I believe in freedom of information"

I find it a very rare occurrence when someone or a group does something that makes me hear:

"We'll maintain this as long as we can, not just because we loved her, but because she really was amazing"

On 9/11/2001, I was driven home early from high school because a group of people selfishly tried to conform the world to how they felt it should be. And, I selfishly wondered whether or not the soccer game I was dressed up for was going to be rescheduled.

On 9/11/2009, I have off from law school where I selfishly decided to relax on a rainy day. And, I selfishly thought about this.

The King of Pop, in Memoriam

Michael Jackson died today, yesterday really but it's still today for me, at age 50.

There's not a lot I can say about him that hasn't already been said and re-hashed and joked about, but love him or hate him, he was probably the most famous, and most consistently famous, single person record breaking controversial superstar that there ever was. And that has got to take a toll on a person like I can't even imagine. He was far too young to go, but old and gone in ways that were terrible and sad to see, even years ago.

He was only alive for 50 years, but we were watching intently for 39 of them. We saw the rise, the fall, the rebirth, the mess and the glory. But whatever it was to us, tabloid news, fodder for jokes, shock and interest, it was his life. Tumultuous to say the least, but it was his, and now it's over.

So wherever you are, MJ, I hope you're at peace. And thanks for all the hits.

Celebrity and Near-Death

So after my post yesterday I saw something today on Idolator about how Michael Jackson may be near death. And it got me thinking about the flip side of yesterday's post - namely that I would not feel bad if Michael Jackson died. The entity that currently exists and calls itself Michael Jackson is so far removed from the young man who made Off the Wall (still a great album, by the way) and has done so much damage to his reputation, it would pretty much take him giving all his money to charity, or to me, to change my opinion of him. I feel a similar way to people like Britney Spears and Tom Cruise, who are not close to death, but clearly have such gaping personal flaws that it hurts how I react to anything they are involved with. And yes, much of Ms. Spears's music is not very good, but that's not the point here.

Basically, to switch from sports to art, don't be Ty Cobb. He has two legacies that he will forever be known by - he was one of the greatest hitters of all time and he was a huge asshole. There's no way this will ever change. So there is a lesson here:

1. Don't be an asshole or a nutjob (Bruce Springsteen, for example, is neither. I do not listen to his music, but I can respect his relative normalcy as a human.)

2. If you're an asshole or a nutjob, cover it up well (Most people don't know much about Michael Jordan. He is by many accounts a less than charitable person who has a huge huge gambling problem, but most people don't know this and that's how he wants it to stay. )

3. If you screw up, be classy about it (Charles Barkley also has a gambling problem, but after losing a whole buttload of money, he has come forward about his problem and is at least giving the impression that he is trying to rectify the issue.)

Art and Death

Before they both passed away, I had the chance to see Mitch Hedberg and Spalding Gray perform live. It remains very sad to me that both of them died untimely deaths. Although Hedberg had a heart condition and was a regular drug user (well obviously) and Spalding had a personal and family history with depression, both were also deeply devoted to their craft and almost supernaturally talented and it was hard to give thought to their passing until it happened.

I was very sad when I heard both of their deaths, but I also felt a little lucky, in a terrible way, that I had seen something special and that no one else would ever see it again. It's one of those conflicting emotions, I absolutely wish both were still alive and creating, but it's also a little special to be part of an exclusive club now. I know many people probably feel that way now about David Foster Wallace.

There is something about the art that each one created that was so wonderful that it makes us a bit greedy in our enjoyment, and this selfishness extends until the artists own end. For most people it doesn't include buying the Kurt Cobain diary, but somewhere in all of us, that same sort of impulse is there.