What We Leave Behind
I learned my friend was dead from Facebook. I look at her last message. It was the one I didn’t reply to. Now, I could never reply.
All I can do is stare at my friend’s Facebook page. “Happy birthday and best wishes,” a man I don’t know has written. I’m puzzled by this. My friend is one of Jehova’s Witnesses. She has never celebrated her birthday. But that isn’t why she’s not having a birthday party today. She’s not having a birthday party because she’s no longer alive.
I learned of my friend’s passing the way nobody really wants to. The thought struck me that I hadn’t heard from her in a while. It was unusual. Normally, she called or messaged every now and then, if only to say hello. At the very least, one of her sarcastic comments should have popped up on my Facebook feed. So I looked at her Facebook page. The comments didn’t make sense at first. They were weirdly brief, and none of them were from her. “Not fair”, “Will miss you”. Then I saw the blurb about a funeral from her ex-husband, and I understood.
Her number would never appear on my caller ID again. I would never hear her infectious laugh. I would never steal one of her jokes. Never give her advice. Never confide in her. But one thing that would continue was her Facebook account.
I learned my friend was dead from Facebook. I look at her last message. It was the one I didn’t reply to. Now, I could never reply.
Social Media Cemetery
“If Hooters had delivery, would they be called Knockers?” she wrote on Facebook. It was the last thing she ever wrote. Suddenly and unexpectedly, she was gone. Her last words might have been a Hooters joke.
Social media networks around the internet are beginning to accumulate accounts belonging to deceased people, and no one really seems to know what this means. A 2018 study by researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute found that, if Facebook can sustain its historical growth rate, the platform will be home to 4.9 billion deceased users by 2100.
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Tinder… these sites, and those like them, are becoming vast digital cemeteries where our social profiles are our tombstones, and our contributions to those networks, our epitaphs.
Most of the major social media companies offer some sort of post-mortem contingency. Depending on the company, this can involve an option to memorialize, deactivate, or fully delete your account. But it’s unclear what actually happens in some of these cases. The process requires proactively engaging before death, or at least, a relative with full knowledge of your online presence who is willing to either curate or scrub your online identity after you’re gone.
In many cases, people simply die. Those who cared for them slowly move on, and the old social media profiles simply… exist. Until an old acquaintance forgets you’re gone, and wishes you a happy birthday when prompted by the system. And then, even long after you’re gone, your data — your life moments that you felt were worth sharing — will belong to someone else, to do with as they wish.
It’s unclear at this point if our digital identities will transcend time or if they are merely a product of our time. But it’s well known that our persistent digital identities are highly filtered. We tend not to share the parts of ourselves we don’t want others to see. These digital identities are not us. They are a flicker; a shadow on the wall.
I’m less interested in these personas than I am the real people that create them. We must be more than these masquerades; I am convinced that those who remember us will remember with the greatest fondness and intensity something that cannot be captured in these mediums.
I did it because he was my friend
After dinner one night, I don’t feel well. “I’m going to lay down,” I tell my girlfriend.
I walk into the bedroom and lay on the bed. Moments later, the door pops open ever so slightly, and her dog, Dennis, enters. He hops up, sniffs me, and snuggles beside me, as close as he can get.
For the remainder of the night, Dennis doesn’t leave my side. He doesn’t sleep. He only watches. Every hour or so he gets up and looks around to make sure everything’s in order, but then he comes back and resumes his vigil. I wonder if my girlfriend is jealous for his attention as she washes the dishes and watches Netflix, alone.
My relationship with Dennis has been tenuous at times. We’ve worked with him extensively and made good progress, but it hasn’t always been easy. Occasionally, my frustration with him would boil over and I would yell at him. I am worried that anger will affect my relationship with him in an irreparable way.
It has not. It’s in this tender moment, and those like it, that I come to understand this. As Dennis invests his full being into comforting and watching over me in my time of vulnerability, I realize that he is not only the best friend I’ve ever had. He might be the best friend I will ever have.
When he becomes ill in his kennel, I reciprocate this care. I wash his kennel with hot disinfectant and, since we had to throw away his blankets, I give him my own pillow so he has something soft to sleep on. I cook him white rice and cut up chicken breast in the hope that he can keep something down.
“That’s when I knew you were the one for me,” my girlfriend would later tell me. I think she thought me altruistic. It didn’t feel like altruism, though. I merely did it, as one breathes. I did it because he was my friend, and I loved him, and I wanted him to get better. I suppose somewhere therein lies a core component of love: we lose the boundary between ourselves that those we care for. We care for them as we care for ourselves, as if there is no difference.
One day, while in my care, Dennis slips out of the house and runs down the road, drunk at his newfound prospect of freedom. Dogs are nothing if not reckless. Immediately the taste of his success turns to ashes in his mouth. He grows frightened and stops a few homes away. I find him cowering in the snow, shaking and terrified. How could I have explained to my girlfriend that I allowed her dog to be run over while she was away at a funeral? I carry him back. Humbled by his adventure, he shadows me for the rest of the day.
As I get ready for bed, Dennis watches from the corner of my bed, tongue hanging out, content as any creature ever was. “You little shit,” I tell him, and pet his head with the utmost gentleness.
The months went on, as they do. Dennis is not gone, but he is to me. I wonder, if he saw me again, would he remember our walks? The way we would chase rabbits and birds by the lake, or stop in the shade to drink water on a hot day?
I remember the night I made the decision to end things. She is wonderful, but things aren’t right. It isn’t that I don’t love her. It’s that I’m living the wrong life. A good life. Just not the life meant for me.
I can’t sleep. I close the bedroom door and walk into the kitchen. I realize this will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I suffer the intermingling feelings of nausea and fear while I lean against the sink in the dark. Dennis drinks from his bowl, then stops and looks at me intently. I can see it in his eyes. “What’s happening?” he seems to ask.
“I’ll miss you most of all,” I whisper, as I pick him up and hug him.
Drops of Jupiter
I don’t remember a lot about Destiny, which makes it all the stranger that I remember her so vividly.
We are in tenth grade, doing our social studies work. I have a headphone in one ear.
“What are you listening to?” she asks.
“Gatecrasher,” I tell her, smugly, since I’m such a connoisseur of European dance music.
Destiny describes in some detail the crush she has on our classmate— a particularly pristine physical specimen who is definitely older than us and whose name is, somewhat hilariously, Chad. Perhaps sensing a proto-emasculation in progress, she turns to me and says “you’re cute, too.”
It is the first time in my life a girl has ever told me I am cute, or told me I am anything, really. It doesn’t matter to me that her comment isn’t genuine. All that matters to this 14-year-old boy is that she said it; cares enough to even think to say it. She makes me feel good about myself and gains nothing from it.
I cackle. “Yeah, yeah. What did you get for number 6?”
I don’t remember what she says next, but she’s still smiling when she says it.
That summer, mom and I are on our way to visit my grandparents. From the car window, I catch a glimpse of Destiny sitting on the grass outside 7-Eleven. She is drinking a Slurpee, enjoying the long summer evenings of the north.
In September, I arrive for the first day of our junior year, but Destiny does not. Her friends erect a memorial for her. I learn she has been killed by a drunk driver.
The only memento I have of her is a full-page tribute in our junior yearbook. “The song, Drops of Jupiter, brought a large smile to her face and a glimmer to her eyes,” her friend wrote of her. “This song was played at her funeral.”
Destiny was a pretty girl with dark hair, a round face, and a pale complexion, who was stolen from us. She taught me that a few simple words could wield tremendous, life-changing power. She’s been gone longer than she was alive, but I will never forget her.
I’m trying to do justice to his memory
Bas twirls her ramen with her chopsticks. “I’m trying to do justice to his memory. I’m trying to get it right for me,” she tells me.
She hides it well, but now that we’re alone, her guard is down. Her father’s recent passing has decimated her. Tears well in her eyes. She inhales deeply, then exhales.
“I’m not afraid to cry,” she protests. “I just… wish we were in a dark room where nobody could see me.”
She describes her father’s digital assets. There are family photos, notes, and projects. All are protected by his Apple ID. She outlines the expensive legal battle that lies ahead if she ever wants to see any of his memories again. Apple will go to bat to protect its customers’ data, even if the data is benign, even if the customer is deceased.
Preparing contingencies seems like a solid plan as long as you know when you’re going to die. But you know the saying about hindsight.
I remember my father’s perception of his own memory. At the hospital, mom tries to take a picture of us together. Dad, emaciated and scarred from the radiation, refuses. “I want Ian to remember me the way I was,” he demands. I accept it like a mantle.
I wonder about the lengths I might have gone to obtain his digital assets, had he lived into our era. I don’t think it matters much, in the end. All these years later, I remember him the way I want to remember him. It’s the way, I think, he would want to be remembered.
Much of Bas’ grief is tied not merely to her father’s passing, but the nature of their relationship. There were things unsaid; things unfinished. She was looking forward to improving her relationship with her father, but then he was swept away. I understand the crushing nature of that feeling.
“Ian never tells me that he loves me,” dad writes to mom, later, when he can no longer speak.
I’m still a teenager when my dad learns the number of his days. He watches Star Wars. I sit in the chair beside him. When the movie ends, I leave. Defiant of his fate, he puts on a load of laundry. Then, he lays on the couch and sleeps until his labored breathing ceases.
Mom wakes me before the sun. They come to take away the body. The man tells me not to look as they close the body bag. I put the laundry in the dryer.
I confess to Bas that I’m writing an article about grief, but it’s a mess. “I don’t understand why I feel this way. I thought I was okay with all of this, but in trying to write it out, I realize I’m not okay with it.”
“I think this will be good for you,” she tells me. “Telling the story will help you process it.”
I tell her about Dennis.
“I was in the same situation as you with a dog. I had to say goodbye, too. Then he died, and I said goodbye again. I had to say goodbye twice. I still remember him. I still grieve for him.”
Someone once told me he knew God was real because we had dogs, and the Devil was real because our dogs died before us.
I’m comforted that Bas knows, and I think she’s comforted that I know. We’ve experienced many of the same types of loss. Grief brings us together in unexpected ways.
We finish our food and put on our coats.
Bas doesn’t know if she’ll go ahead with the legal battle. She tells me I make her seem more resilient than she really is, but I’ve seen the hours she works. I know what she’s overcome. Grit and determination are part of who she is. Declining to take Apple to court won’t steal that from her.
I, too, am a person of principle and determination. Or, I try to be. When the moment comes, the words leave us. We want to act, but we’re frozen. We’d take a bullet if only we could move, if only we could speak up. But we can’t. How different could things have been?
Guilt, shame, and regret. Insidious reapers. Invisible until their clutches penetrate our bones and drain from us the very will to go on.
We mustn’t let the past dictate our futures.
“Did those guys finish before us?” I ask, while we walk in the January air.
Artifacts
In Roadside Picnic, the Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky describe the aftermath of The Visitation, an event where extraterrestrials stop briefly on Earth, leaving behind powerful artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties. In the book, a character compares The Visitation to a picnic. The Visitors are the picnickers, and we are the frightened forest animals who slowly come out to explore what the picnickers have left behind.
The Visitors may not even remember the things they’ve left behind, or their visit to our planet among the many they have seen. But their artifacts become miraculous and powerful beyond measure to those who are left with them.
It is this way, I think, with the love we have for those who have left us. They leave us with artifacts, impressed upon us. These are the things that made us love them most. These are the things that made them their authentic selves. These are the things that made us who we are. These are the things we grieve.
Love is not found in moments of grand proportion. It is found in the mundane. It is found so easily in the wake, after the ship has gone to sea. Love may be powerful, but like life itself, it is ultimately fleeting. It is teetering, wobbling, always. With a whisper, it stumbles, and you can never stand it back up.
Some day soon, perhaps in forty years, there will be no one alive who has ever known me. That’s when I will be truly dead — when I exist in no one’s memory. I thought a lot about how someone very old is the last living individual to have known some person or cluster of people. When that person dies, the whole cluster dies, too, vanishes from the living memory. I wonder who that person will be for me. Whose death will make me truly dead?
— Irvin D. Yalom in Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy
If you need help
The loss of a loved one for any reason can be extremely difficult. If you need help, see a professional or contact one of these resources.
Australia
- Emergencies: 000
- beyondblue: 1300 22 4636, 24 hours / 7 days a week.
- Blue Knot Foundation Helpline: 1300 657 380, 9am-5pm AEST / 7 days a week.
- Butterfly Foundation’s National Helpline: 1800 33 4673, 8am-midnight AEST / 7 days a week.
- eheadspace: 1800 650 890, 9am-1am AEST / 7 days a week.
- Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800. 24 hours / 7 days a week.
- Lifeline: 13 11 14.
- MensLine Australia: 1300 78 99 78, 24 hours / 7 days a week.
- MindSpot: 1800 61 44 34 AEST, 8am-8pm (Mon-Fri), 8am-6pm (Sat).
- QLife: 1800 184 527, 3pm-12am (midnight) AEST / 7 days a week.
- PANDA (Perinatal Anxiety & Depression Australia): 1300 726 306, 9am-7:30pm AEST (Mon-Fri).
- SANE Australia: 1800 18 7263, 10am-10pm AEST (Mon-Fri).
- Suicide Call Back Service: 1300 659 467, 24 hours / 7 days a week.
- Open Arms — Veterans and Families Counselling: 1800 011 046, 24 hours / 7 days a week.
Canada
- Emergencies: 911
- Kids Help Phone 1–800–668–6868
- Crisis Services Canada 1–833–456–4566 or text 45645
- First Nations and Inuit Hope for Wellness Help Line 1‑855‑242–3310
- Centre for Suicide Prevention 1–833–456–4566
- Canada Drug Rehab Addiction Services Directory 1–877–746–1963
- National Eating Disorder Information Centre 1–866–633–4220
- Mental health services for RCMP employees
- Mental health services for armed forces members and families
New Zealand
- Emergencies: 111
- Lifeline 0800 543 354 (0800 LIFELINE) or free text 4357 (HELP)
- Suicide Crisis Helpline 0508 828 865 (0508 TAUTOKO)
- Healthline 0800 611 116
- Samaritans 0800 726 666
- Depression Helpline 0800 111 757 or free text 4202 (to talk to a trained counsellor about how you are feeling or to ask any questions)
- www.depression.org.nz
- SPARX.org.nz
United Kingdom
- Emergencies: 999
- Samaritans 116 123 (free to call from within the UK and Ireland), 24 hours a day
- Mind 0300 123 3393 to call, or text 86463
- Rethink Mental Illness 0300 5000 927 (Open 10am to 2pm, Monday to Friday)
- Papyrun UK 0800 068 4141
- YoungMinds 0808 802 5544
- Campaign Against Living Miserably (CALM) 0800 58 58 58
- Sane 0300 304 7000 (local rate on BT landlines) Open 4:30–10:30pm every day
- National Health Service 111
United States
- Emergencies: 911
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline : call 1–800–273-TALK (1–800–273–8255) to be directed to a crisis centre closest to you.
- National Hopeline: call 1–800-SUICIDE (1–800–784–2433) to speak to a crisis counsellor.
- The Trevor Project: provides crisis and suicide support for LGBTQ youth, 1–866–4-U-TREVOR (1–866–488–7386).
- Find a therapist in your local area.
- HelpPRO therapist finder
- Suicide Survivor Support Group Directory if you’ve lost somebody to suicide, locate a support group in your area.
- Mental Health America Hotline: Text MHA to 741741. Mental Health America is a nationwide organization that provides assistance through this text line. You will be linked to someone who can guide you through a crisis or just provide information.
- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1–800–273–8255. Crisis intervention and free emotional support are available, which is helpful when you need confidential assistance during a time of emotional distress for you or a loved one. The helpline is open 24/7, and a live online chat is available as well.
- Crisis Text Line: Text CONNECT to 741741. Specialized crisis counselors are just a text message away on this free, confidential 24-hour support line. To further protect your privacy, these messages do not appear on a phone bill. The text line also provides services and support if you are upset, scared, hurt, frustrated, or distressed.
- The Samaritans: 1–212–673–3000. This is a New York–based organization operates a 24-hour crisis hotline for anyone in the area. Even if you’re not in crisis but feel like you need emotional support, this hotline can help.
- Veterans Crisis Line: 1–800–273–8255. Text a message to 838255. Operated by the Department of Veterans Affairs, these services aid veterans and their families who may be in crisis by connecting them with VA responders.
