If Benjamin Franklin were alive today, he might have remarked, “nothing is certain in life except death and Facebook.” After all, as Leona Helmsley famously remarked, “only little people pay taxes.” Facebook, on the other hand, seems here to stay. And those two remaining certainties are intertwined.
As a child I enjoyed delving into the nooks and crannies of the daily newspaper. It appeared to be a highly codified window into the mysterious world of adulthood. The front section was more or less accessible to the novice, but the further one got into it, the more it seemed designed to be legible only to an exclusive society of grownups. The specialized jargon and tables of the sports page, and likewise the stultifyingly obscure business section. (MS Word doesn’t like ‘stultifyingly.’ Too bad.) What a relief to come upon the “arts” or “living” section with the truly important stuff: horoscopes and advice columns (both of which we sensed were for entertainment purposes only), movie schedules (highly critical in the pre-internet, pre-cable age), puzzles and above all the comics.
The obituary section was of minor interest, and like the business and sports pages, came with its specialized jargon and rituals. And as with the business and sports pages, our parents, who apparently had been to adult school, helped us to decipher it. “A long illness,” for example, was code for cancer. We got a vaguely prurient pleasure out of scanning the small black and white photos of an invariably smiling man in a business suit or uniform, or a smiling woman in a nice dress and carefully arranged hair. What was I looking for? A clue to the meaning of death (or life)? A feeling of satisfaction that they were gone while we were still here? I don’t know.
The text followed a prescribed formula: date of death, the “survived by” list, and a sort of resume of education, career, and charity work. Only the nice stuff made it into the story—everyone who died was a happy saint. In other words, all the really interesting stuff was left out. The ex-Mr. X went to Centerville High where he played right tackle, served in the Army, got a degree in accounting from State U., worked for Acme Insurance, got married, had kids, attended First Methodist, was prominent in the Lion’s Club, and passed on after a long illness. What? Is that all there is? The scariest part of the obituary section for a child was how boring and limited most lives seemed to be.
But one thing was clear and comforting: the death announcements, and their dead, were handled with seriousness and respect. That was the real point of the specialized jargon and ritualized format. How different from the announcements I see today on Facebook.
Whenever my time comes, I would prefer for the event not to be “posted.” The idea of being arbitrarily stuck on your “feed” between a photo of someone’s awesome Margarita and a heartfelt elegy for someone else’s recently passed Labrador, appended with plenty of crying-smiley-face icons, feels…very wrong on several levels. Nothing against Margaritas or Labradors. But I’d be happier with just a little black and white photo of my smiling younger self in the local paper (if there still is one), along with a highly condensed biography. Just the nice bits.
The Garden of Eaton 