By Monica Yancey
I grab my phone to peek at the step tracker and am diverted by a text. “Just saw some weird stuff on Facebook – Jessica might have died today.” I jump on, open her profile and see condolences. Her second to the last post says, “The worst thing about being sick is that you can’t get warm.” My eyes widen in horror. Her last post says, “Still in the hospital. You can call me. I might not be able to talk for long, but I have my phone.” The fact that I had unfollowed Jessica (her gardening posts bored me) now felt like an egregious betrayal. I hadn’t unfriended her, I reassured myself, but still, guilt coursed through me. I never made that call. She was barely forty, what could have happened?
Postmortem, her Facebook wall is blowing up. I touch the circular refresh arrow. I touch it again. I pull the wall down with my finger, just in case the refresh button isn’t working. A steady stream of condolences rewards my compulsive behavior. Some are by people I know. I imagined them thumb typing into her profile with tears in their eyes standing in Target; I am in the middle of a dog park. Awakening to my surroundings, I note my dog’s location and take a seat on the nearest bench.
While I search her profile for answers, memories of Jessica cross through my mind, like a news ticker at the bottom of a television broadcast. I met her at a poli-sci summer program for high school students. I was a resident assistant, and she was my boss. Our similarities led to an instant bond: we were ex-Mormons from Utah. We named the bench where we hid to smoke cigarettes, La Banche, and said it in a French accent. Like most inside jokes, it made no sense. (It was also not the French word for bench.)
She was a doctoral candidate by her mid-twenties, but she never finished the dissertation. Its importance was edged out by her first real job, the summer school where we met. At six feet, she was a foot taller than me and had dark, thick hair and fair skin. I was tan and had a shaved head (my youthful abstention from the dictates of female beauty, and you know, the patriarchy). There we were, the tall Snow White, Ph.D., ABD, and her dwarf undergraduate Sinead O’Connor sidekick.
I’m desperate to learn how she died; my eyes scan for clues. My head is hanging from my neck, and my shoulders flex around the phone’s screen. One hand is cupping the device, claw-like, and the other hand is in a fist, but with my pointer finger moving purposefully as if conducting a symphony. Meanwhile, snippets of memory continue to pass through me. Jessica was five years older than me. Her life experience and formal vocabulary impressed me. In casual conversation, she started sentences with transition words like “alternatively” or “subsequently,” a probable byproduct of being on a college debate team. She was one of those empowered academic types that I hoped to become. I looked up to her.
I keep searching online but still don’t know how she died. The phone is flat, shiny and hotter by the minute. I refresh Jessica’s profile again and again and again. The trickle of condolences wanes and I realize that I’ve seen what there is to see on Facebook. How long have I been sitting here? I lift my head out of the screen’s gravity and return to the park where I’m still sitting on a bench, but not La Banche. I watch my dog. I breathe; my body loosens. I call a friend who knew Jessica. “Yeah,” he says, “I saw that on Facebook.”
***
At the time of Jessica’s death, I hadn’t seen or talked to her in years even though we had been “Facebook friends” with each other for over a decade, and real friends for another five. Had we remained close, I would have known it was Lupus that took her life.
Even though I couldn’t pull my eyes away, scrolling through Facebook for answers was a disturbing way to spend my first moments of grief. And when Jessica’s profile morphed into a Legacy Page, my unease turned to anger. The Legacy Page felt trite, unreal, voyeuristic, public, flattened out. Jessica was a real person, not an avatar. And she was dead.
Was this just the anger of grief, or was grief enabling me to see clearly? This question began my quest to track Facebook’s role in my relationship with Jessica: Did Facebook, built to narrate human life and death, deserve all the trust I had so thoughtlessly given it? When I joined Facebook, over ten years ago, Jessica was one of my first contacts. Our friendship’s life cycle was nearing its end because we didn’t live in the same city and no longer worked together. So when Facebook seemed to announce to the world, “You never have to lose touch again!” we “added” each other intent on keeping close.
And it wasn’t just Jessica that Facebook worked its magic on. When the social glow of young adulthood dimmed, social media stepped in promising me just what I lacked. You see, I had fewer friends by the year due to moving for jobs, and getting older, but on Facebook, I was popular. Like ghosts, the people of yesteryear appeared before me each time I logged in and these “friends” “liked” me.
Popularity was easy to control too: the more I participated, the more attention I got back. Yet, the truth is that most of my online connections didn’t step foot into my actual life, even the ones I interacted with daily. Even the ones I really cared about, like Jessica. All we had were clicks and comments.
I settled for it though because managing relationships this effortlessly was too tempting to resist. Calls felt hard compared to likes; before I knew it, I had quarantined most of my interactions to Facebook. I was part of a generation who never learned how to maintain relationships without software. And thanks to Facebook, I had a lot of “friends.” In this sense, their platform solved the problem they created: I needed software to keep up with hundreds of “Facebook friends.” Before social media, I had five or six close friends and I made time to nurture those relationships. But with hundreds of friends the best I could hope for was to monitor connections online by scanning for highlights and clicking accordingly.
This friend collection wasn’t intimate. From the very beginning, the norm was that everyone adds everyone. I had my boss, professors, students, my mom, college roommates, Jessica, and my extended family all in the same virtual room. This made authenticity difficult, if not impossible. I found it safest to post inoffensive mumbles and my personality neutralized. Yet, I watched friends’ posts believing theirs were real. It was, in retrospect, a perfect example of the fundamental attribution error.
Eventually, I unfollowed Jessica. I didn’t just dislike gardening; the truth is, I assumed that her posts meant she had lost her edge. I wrote her off; I thought less of her. I conflated who she was with her Facebook persona, and why not? That’s all I had. The egregious mistake was not me unfollowing her, as I believed in the moments after her death, but in exporting our friendship to Facebook in the first place and then judging her based on a softwaremediated performance.
***
As I dug through the remnants of my virtual experience with Jessica, I knew the analysis mattered; I had living friends caught in the same crossfire. So, did Facebook deserve a front seat to my life, and death?
No.
The archaeology of my virtual friendship with Jessica revealed that Facebook wasn’t a godsend, keeping us close, it was an intrusion. Instead of remembering Jessica naturally, triggered by a song perhaps, I rolled my eyes at her gardening posts. I rolled my eyes at one of my most precious friends. The Facebook feed told me what to think of her. It directed and narrated my memories. It contaminated my inner life.
Had she not died, authentic reconnection was unlikely because our online dynamic had shifted my perceptions of her for the worse. Artificially “keeping” Jessica killed our friendship; replacing memories with scroll.
Contrary to popular belief, attaching someone to you online is worse than losing touch. Things change, chapter’s end, people move, life unfolds. Losing touch honors this. It’s a kindness, not a slight. Losing touch invites a person away from your daily life and into your inner life, into your memory. Your mindscape is powerful and vivid, full of meanings to be deciphered. You can love from there.
Thoughts of the person will be triggered by an old picture, a food, a scent, or a mood. Maybe a whole part of your life reminds you of one special person. And someday, you might reconnect by chance or by effort, memories intact. But if you don’t find each other again, there is still love. To protect our story, I should have let Jessica go.
You can’t keep everyone you’ve ever loved, nor is clinging to acquaintances honest. Relational maintenance takes time. There are physical realities in play: hours in the day; minutes in the hour. A friendship can’t be sustained with comments, likes, and emojis. Human beings need conversation, love and the warmth of a smile given not captured. We are not efficient or convenient. Friendships can’t be fostered en masse.
***
My favorite memory of Jessica happened before Facebook infiltrated our friendship.
It happened the summer we knew everything about each other. It was the middle of the night in New York City. At Jessica’s insistence, we made our way to Central Park and climbed up onto the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, on top of the giant mushroom. We took in Eva Cassidy’s Time After Time album, heads adjoined with a set of earbuds. Our eyes rested on the lamp lit pathways of the most beautiful park in the world. Tipsy and young, we leaned into each other. The music made the whole park feel like a living, breathing piece of art, our huddled bodies included.
If relationships have peaks, this was ours. The view was transformative. It changed me, became part of who I am, even after the night ended, even after the source was gone. No longer jeopardized by Facebook’s counterevidence, the memory’s truths are secure and inside of me now: You are loved and known. The world is at your fingertips. Life is magical.