On this day in 1984 my parents brought home my baby sister. Roughly this day, today’s her birthday but I think despite my dramatic beginning to this story she actually came home a few days after November 12th, because there were some slight complications and she spent a few days in a humidity crib. One way or the other today is her birthday.
When I woke up this morning I picked up my phone and opened Facebook, grabbed the coffee that was on the bench that my wife had made when she made hers, and sat down on the couch. Facebook greeted me with “Today is Courtenay’s birthday, we thought you wouldn’t want to miss wishing her a happy birthday!” This is a cute sentiment. I’ve heard discussions that it’s impersonal and distant to wish someone a happy birthday only when prompted to automatically and when it’s trivial to do so (just tap and write happy birthday right?) but I appreciate it. I’m the type of guy that misses these things if I don’t get reminders. I genuinely don’t want to miss wishing people happy birthday and this functionality makes sure I don’t. Except my sister didn’t turn 31 today, she died in May.
I want to wish my sister a happy birthday so hard that it physically hurts. I want to hug her really hard and hear her say “oof” into my shoulder, in the way I never did in the last year of her life because she was too fragile. I want to see her two year old son give her an awkward, over-excited baby hug, and I want to see her five year old daughter give her the most grown-up and dignified hug she can but counterpointed perfectly by presenting her with some unashamedly age-appropriate gift like pasta spray-painted and stuck on a sheet of paper. Then on the weekend I want to take the kids for the day while she and her husband head to the beach and eat ice cream and steal kisses. The kids could stay overnight, then they could come over next day and pick them back up at midday. We could all go for lunch at a nearby cafe before they head back home and we could all catch up again on the next weekend. Or not, maybe we’d have other stuff on that weekend, but “see you soon.” one way or the other.
At the risk of this becoming grief porn, I want to get to my point.
In the days after Courtenay died I contacted Facebook — where so much of her life and later her terminal illness played out — and notified them of her passing away. There’s a process for this, just like there’s so much offline paperwork and arrangements. Facebook did what they then do, converting her page to a page in which the headline “Remembering” is added above her name. The purpose of the page then changes for everyone including those closest to her offline. The changed format of the page, “Remembering Courtenay” where her name once stood alone sets a new, weird tone. It becomes a shrine in the early days, an “in memoriam” in later ones, where people no longer expect two way communication but do a strange but comforting “drop by” with wall posts like “today was hard, I thought of you, I miss you so much but know you’re looking down on me.” What struck me today, months later, is how much little else has actually changed.
Why did I get prompted to wish my sister a happy birthday? Will I get prompted to celebrate her wedding anniversary? Why is she at the top of my friends list? Why does my heart get torn out of my chest every time I see Facebook tell me the time she “was last seen” in Messenger — a multi-layered statement Facebook probably isn’t understanding the gravity of.
It’s because we don’t die online properly.
We share literally everything about our lives, in many cases unthinkingly. When we pass, we leave those sharings as a standing, divorced from reality reminder to the bereft that just kinda stopped the day we could no longer type, tap or click. No more Facebook posts, no more Instagram pictures, no more Tweets. The last tweet, the last share, literally the last post, all stand as this weird, abrupt, online reality pointing to the fact the offline reality has ceased. All that we share, and what we do when it stops, has all come about over the space of about eight years, in which many people have no doubt died but each is dis-serviced by the fact eight years is insufficient a period of time for Silicon Valley to figure out how to retrofit rites about burying our virtual dead. Facebook has done a pioneering but clumsy service in allowing us to conspicuously show that an account is that of someone who’s passed away, but literally no thought has gone into what should then happen next and nobody else has done much at all. What does it mean to be online, but a memory? What should a memory be forbidden from doing that a person can do online? It occurs to me that a widow or widower must have, just on the statistics, picked up their husband or wife’s phone by mistake (same model, I just left it on the charger since that day I guess) and accidentally messaged a friend, driving a bolt into their heart for a second.
We need a way to die online. If my time comes tomorrow, I want the offline funeral to serve as a way — as best as funerals can — of drawing a line under my life and letting the grieving process begin. I would know in that circumstance my wife and friends would still go to tell me something they thought I’d appreciate before that screeching internal halt of reality, but the funeral serves to cushion the blow a bit. It’s a thing to remember when our arm absent-mindedly flops into the vacant half of the bed, the grounding reality when we laugh at something and are left helpless with our first instinct to share. We have no online analogy for any of this. We have no way of drawing a line underneath our online. It’s something the tech giants that increasingly provide our social experience don’t even seem to have considered, and it’s an increasing problem as more keyboards go untouched for the first time. Dying with dignity is a discussion globally. Dying online needs to be part of that.
This was hard to write. Thanks for reading it.
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