By Pam McAllister
I was shocked to come upon Jimmy on Facebook. He died four years ago. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up and a cold shiver ran through my soul. I hadn’t expected to find his smiling face here. Isn’t it macabre?
Are the dead expected to keep up with their Facebook Timeline? I checked his page and found that he’s added nothing new, thank God. On second thought, it would be nice to hear about the afterlife first hand.
How long has this sort of thing been going on? Does God know about this? Whoa, talk about resurrection! Houdini vowed to stay in touch if he could. Is he on Facebook? OMG, he is! I wonder how all this is impacting people who run seances?
While Jimmy’s added nothing new, others have left fond messages for him to read. I had so many questions. After I said “ewww” a few dozen times and flapped my hands, I decided to ask Lisa about all this. She knew Jimmy, too. I trusted that she wouldn’t judge my discomfort.
Lisa gently brought me up to speed on social media mourning etiquette, then confided that she finds Jimmy’s ongoing Facebook page comforting. She’s even left him several messages. “It’s like he isn’t really dead,” Lisa explained. “He lives on in the cyber universe.”
Digging deeper, I learned that Facebook pages and profiles can remain up after someone dies. The page becomes a memorial where the deceased can be publicly remembered. Facebook has become the world’s largest virtual cemetery. Rules are still being written to clarify who can inherit or delete a Facebook account, and, increasingly, users are leaving written instructions for their digital legacies.
I learned of Lilly’s death by email. It was a general announcement that went to a broad smattering of friends.
Later, on Facebook, I gently conveyed that the news was wretched and shocking, not, however, tragic. Lilly’s was a good long life, a blessedly short death. She and I were never close; our lives overlapped through a circle of friends. I grieved more for the impact her death would have on that circle. I worried for them, felt for them. I also posted that I had spent several healing hours at the library, writing, reading, chatting quietly with a friend. All was well. I felt at peace.
The response to my nuanced reference to a friend’s death and the healing afternoon that followed was almost universally anguished. “Oh, how awful!” Facebook friends wrote. “Someday you will laugh again.” I felt guilty: I had already laughed and the sun had not yet set.
Had I misled my Facebook community and somehow implied that I was devastated or inconsolable by Lilly’s death? The excessive words of comfort were out of proportion to my stated experience. I had intended only to share that the news was jarring, but that I was OK. Somehow, I had inadvertently unleashed an avalanche of emojis, miniature faces spurting copious tears.
I wanted to write: Wait! Save your sympathy. I’m anticipating bad news from Toronto. The death of dear friend Taylor is imminent. When he goes, the landscape of my life will change forever. I dread the news, check my emails with trepidation every morning because I don’t want that day to come. I promise that, when it does, I will be paralyzed, inconsolable, curled up into a trembling ball, staring at the wall, all color drained. That news will warrant all the compassion I’m getting today. But this afternoon I sat happily in the library after hearing of Lilly’s death, and I worked on some writing, sure that the world is still beautiful and life goes on. Don’t cry for me, compañeros.
It seems that we are all consumers now, feeding on the dramas we perceive, attempting to affirm each other’s feelings, sometimes, clearly, missing the complexities. We turn to Facebook friends to validate our real-life experiences with love, heartbreak, work, family, grief, but our news gets flattened to its base components on the digital interface, all nuance gone.
Facebook has added gesture-based emojis to the “Like” or thumbs up sign to expand our range of emotional responses and relieve us from having to type out messages of sympathy, anger, astonishment, love. If only there were a way to clue in the clueless about metaphor.
Recently, after a few discouraging weeks during which I sank into a murky depression, I got clever with a metaphor, one I thought obvious, about my houseplant refusing to bloom because it didn’t see the point. I received heartfelt gardening tips from Facebook friends determined to cheer me. Egads!
We live in a universe of oversimplification, even though life continues to be complicated. We are thwarted by the meagerness of available emojis. I wonder what emoji shorthand would fit this morning’s news of Lilly’s death and my sweet afternoon in the library?