Social Glu Communications

When I die and they lay me to rest, I’m going to go to the social networking site that’s the best.

No one I’m connected directly to on Facebook has died, not yet. When they do, here’s what will happen.

We, your Facebook friends, will hear the news, most likely through Facebook. We will rush to your page immediately, read your last status post in disbelief, especially if the death is unexpected. “But…he just made chicken soup last night!” we will think, incredulous, “She can’t be dead, she was going skiing this weekend!” If you have pictures of your pets and your spouse and your sweet, sweet children in your Facebook photo sets, we will click through them, slowly, and cry and cry and cry. It will be heartbreaking and awful. And then we will begin to write.

We will record our memories of you, even though you will never read them. We will post messages of love and support to your family, who may also never see them. If we are religious, we will post and promise prayers. We’ll read every word your other Facebook friends write in the next few days and weeks. We will visit your profile page often, tracing the connections of your life to ours by clicking through to strangers’ pages to see how you might know each other. In our individual corners of the country and the world, we will sift through your Facebook content like runes, willing you to be still alive. It will feel strange, yet cathartic.

News stories of fatalities resonate much more when the paper lists pictures and biographies of the victims. Even if they don’t die, if you feel like you know each person involved in a tragedy, it is all the more tragic. It’s why 9/11 was so unbearably awful. We knew the people who died. They were our sisters and our husbands, our friends and our classmates. We learned their stories, all of them.

Death horrifies the living, and rightly so. It’s almost guaranteed to be filled with some amount of pain and of fear, two things we spend our whole lives avoiding. I’ve seen three babies born, given birth to two babies myself, and watched one person die a relatively peaceful death, in bed after a long illness. Of all of these events, witnessing the death was somehow the most profound. We don’t know how to act around death. We drink bad coffee, make small talk with the others in the hospital room and wait, casting increasingly uneasy glances at the sick bed. For as common as death is, most of us are not around it much and it weirds us out.

Two of my grandparents are buried on Cape Cod, where I grew up. I went to their funerals, but due to time and distance I’ve never been back to visit their gravesites. My maternal grandfather, who survived the beaches of Normandy, had his ashes cast into the sea. Before there were virtual places to stay connected, there was only memory and if we were close enough by to attend, a memorial. When someone died, before Facebook and Twitter and email, we heard about it later, after the fact. We didn’t know what album they had listened to two hours before the car accident.

My friends and I, avid consumers of social media, are in our late thirties and early forties. We are still young, we think. But like everyone who has gone before us, we’re starting to realize at last our own stupid mortality. We didn’t wear enough sunblock and have to get bits cut off of us in doctors’ offices. We drank too much and have to cut back to stay healthy longer for our children. We did nothing and got fucking breast cancer.

What will Facebook become, as we age and die and it remains? For the living mourning the dead, it’s already become a low-tech online memory book, one that Facebook is still trying to sort out. Who owns the profiles of the dead? Should there be a “widow” status that links to the deceased page if they so choose? Will Facebook figure out how to monetize death in some way (death is a quietly booming industry in America.) Or will there be something else, some other platform or technology that connects us even more?

What’s most interesting to me about technology is how it both reflects and changes our behavior and by proxy, our lives. I’m an optimistic atheist, which feels like a contradiction. While I willingly subscribe to newsletters that relentlessly tell us how badly we’ve mistreated the earth and attend conferences where scientists and researchers and other big thinkers confirm that yes, it’s true, the world is atrocious and the oceans polluted and children are dying faster than anyone could ever save them, I still love the world and want to be in it. I think this is why Steve Jobs’ final words resonated so deeply with so many of us aging techies. “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow,” he breathed as he gazed at the faces of his wife and children, his life’s love, halfway here and halfway to whatever’s next, maybe nothing.

That Jobs is not here anymore to help us figure out what is next is unfortunate and sad. We will always need to celebrate our loved ones’ lives and to share our grief with others. So, we’ll continue to come together using whatever methods are available, offering condolences, trading stories, connecting the tenuous threads of our collective lives. But Steve if you can hear us, maybe post the answer to my Facebook wall – enough about the tech. When will we be immortal?

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr