We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
In a lovely, heartbreaking piece in Good, writer Rebecca Armendariz charts her relationship with her boyfriend from its early moments to the days before his death by cancer. The emails they shared are still there, in the Gmail cloud; the text messages they sent are still on the phone; he still seems to be there, somewhere, just out of reach.
We live a different way these days, with electronic artifacts embedded all over the place, with Facebook accounts, text messages, blog posts, comments, a constellation of bits of ourselves, instantly available to anyone who's looking. And because we live a different way, we die a different way, too. From Good:
Clark and I met on the Thursday before Labor Day, August 30, 2007. I don’t know exactly when we first said I love you, but the first email exchange containing the phrase, which he casually includes before signing off, is dated October 3 of that year.
Nearly four years later, I sometimes type his email address in the search box in my Gmail. Hundreds of results pop up, and I’ll pick a few at random to read. The ease of our everyday interactions is what kills me. The way we spoke to each other about what I’d bring home for dinner or whether it was a PBR or a Grolsch kind of night. In nearly every conversation, there is something that releases the pressure from my chest by forcing a giant laugh.
All of the electronic conversations we share with our loved ones -- the meaningless ones; the momentous ones -- are preserved, somewhere, in the unlimited storewidth of our various devices and accounts. From the forgettable:
Clark: did you eat?
Me: yes i had soup and chips but whatever someone else has smells delish
Clark: k just as long as you ate something
how do you spell Bodasifa?
from Point Break?
Me: let me look it up
Bodhisattva
Clark: ?
really?
sattva?
Me: yep
it’s a buddhism thing
To the unforgettable:
Clark: babies, did they say the next treatment is rough? like IL-2?
Me: the one they want to do to you?
Clark: yes
Me: i don’t think anything compares to IL2.
but i think it is semi rough. i think it’s less puking, pooping, ill feeling and more weak, tired. however, IL2 has a really low success rate, the other treatment has a high one.
i was reading testimonies of people who have been cured by the treatment, this was a few months ago, and the one guy wrote that absolutely nothing compares to IL2.
honey?
Clark: i can’t stop crying
its hard to read the computer
i’m so happy
Me: yes baby
Clark: :-D
we are going to do it baby
Me: i’m so happy too
i know we are
To the heartbreaking:
Clark: I would go to my mothers
chill there
u can start having a life again
Me: baby, my life is being with you and fighting this cancer
that’s what it is
i do not resent you, and i never will|
i love you and we’re in this together
I'm not sure -- and I don't think the author is, either -- if all of these memories (literally: part of the memory storage capacity of some collection of servers, somewhere) make it easier to move past grief, or harder:
And there it is: his name is right under hers. I move the cursor over it, and the thumbnail pops up with all of his information. His address, clarkstatehood@gmail. com. His icon, a photo of Patrick Swayze fromRoad House. A little gray dot, just like the one next to Cella’s name. As if he’s just not available to chat at the moment.
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Dec '10
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
Is it better or worse to be revisited by the digital ghosts of the loves we've lost....I simply do not know. Maybe the question is answered in the qualities of the persons who has gone.
Rob, thank you for being, simultaneously a voice of depth and levity in an a trying political season. Sometimes it is simply a great value in an of itself to escape the trifles of political squabbling to remember that there is beauty and pain in the world and they usually overlap for our own benefit and reflection.
Edited on Sep 24, 2011 at 12:06amRe: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
That's cancer. And that is death. Whether or not preserved on the Internet.
Dec '10
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
True, but isn't the best of any of us preserved in memory and not bumbling about through life? I don't want to idealize death nor would I wish to minimalize loss, but since it is inevitable, shouldn't we pull from it's grasp what can be saved?
Sep '10
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
I have a tendency to keep old emails and have some from lost relationships as well. It's a melancholy thing to go through them, but a very human one. That we transcend this physical world is a comforting thought as you read them. Life has joy and life has pain, but at the end there is the joy of the Lord.
Nov '10
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
Emily Dickinson didn’t know about email but she seems to have captured the essence of this discussion with Death Sets A Thing Significant:
Death sets a thing significant
The eye had hurried by,
Except a perished creature
Entreat us tenderly
To ponder little workmanships
In crayon or in wool,
With "This was last her fingers did,"
Industrious until
The thimble weighed too heavy,
The stitches stopped themselves,
And then 't was put among the dust
Upon the closet shelves.
A book I have, a friend gave,
Whose pencil, here and there,
Had notched the place that pleased him,--
At rest his fingers are.
Now, when I read, I read not,
For interrupting tears
Obliterate the etchings
Too costly for repairs.
Sep '10
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
I've watched a friend die on Facebook and I finally unfriended the account because of the excess of treacly tributes to her, devoid of any thistles or weeds. I want my memories warts and all, not whitewashed of all the rough edges.
Oct '10
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
The combination of death and the Internet, whether it's email, social media, or other Net presences, has always been a fascinating thing for me to think about. We all get to know each other on sites that we visit. Or if we have blogs and join a blogging community, we form relationships there.
But what if something happens to you? To everybody else, you've just dropped off the face of the Earth?
This doesn't relate directly with Rob's post, but it's weird how even the act of dying and the results from it has changed since the Internet age began.
Feb '11
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
I was forced to look for a new job four years ago, and I had the help of seven friends who received a weekly update from me, who in turn offered encouragement via email. Today, this journal and interaction serves as a kind of journal and travelogue, like those dotted line paths in the Sunday panel of Family Circus. Like my resume, these communications serve as a scrapbook of blessing and deliverance. The trick is to take the time to actually look back at what we thought was so important, so tied-to-the-tracks inescapable, and so miraculous and heartbreaking.
Jan '11
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
I’m Jewish, more culturally tied than religious; I’ve abandoned all but a few of the mandates and admonitions, and those I keep are not chores but provide comfort and a welcome sense of communion with my culture and my past. For example, Jews light a candle on the anniversary date of a loved one’s death (they sell them in i.e., supermarkets). They’re called yahrtzeit (years time) candles, and they burn for about 24 hours. It is meant to function as a annual remembrance and communion with those we have lost, and it works for me. The place is in the kitchen, and during the day, when I notice it in passing, I find myself chatting to that candle in the old familiar ways, and I recollect anecdotes from times past that would otherwise remain hidden. I suppose it’s a way of keeping one’s self and life intact. As I say, it works for me, but as to why – that must be left to psychiatry.
Mar '11
Re: We Live On, in Emails and Text Messages
I wish I had never read this.