Op-ed: One Final Status Update

Right before he
hanged himself, my friend Arron typed a final status update on Facebook. His missive was notable for its
bilingual pith: “Adios, my loves.” Moments later came the first response: “Where are you going,
handsome?”

Arron suffered
from addiction via a self-loathing undoubtedly facilitated by the mother who
immediately swooped in to steal his valuables, burn his body, and toss the bits
into the Hudson. A few weeks earlier, Arron creepily told my friend Dan that he’d
tried to kill himself twice and the third time he ”wouldn’t fail.” Dan endeavored
to lighten the mood with positivity, to pooh-pooh the pity.

When news spread
that the third time was indeed the charm, Dan and those in whom Arron confided
felt massive guilt for not having done more to stop the self-destruction. Others
felt miserable that he didn’t reach out so they could attempt to save him. I know
this because it’s all there, archived on his Facebook wall.

Sometimes Facebook
heaven sends me a surprise update. Do you think Arron wears underwear? Another friend (who died of an aneurysm) is
continually tagged by a former flame in travel photos like the globetrotting
ghost of a garden gnome. Still another friend is dead from a GHB overdose but
keeps popping up — he’s a mutual fan of Richard Dawkins! Recently, a Farmville
pig wandered onto his property.

Nobody is resting
in peace anymore. The suicide, the aneurysm, the overdose. Distilled into how
they died because their pages are a persistent reminder they are dead, not of
how they made me feel alive. I’d like to believe a legacy is in memories made,
not the unintended irony of a last status update. Not in a ghastly, never-ending
funeral procession like Alzheimer’s or Amy Winehouse.

I love to remember
my friends, but not this new element of surprise. Type a message and his name
appears as a suggested recipient. I’m
sorry, Arron, now is not a good time for me! Fuck off, because today I’m angry.
Stephen Hawking is trapped inside of a black hole and you couldn’t see the light?

Facebook is the
modern-day mausoleum, only now it is mobile. The mausoleum can travel to you,
posing a digital age moral dilemma: Do you delete the dead ones? Faces, photos,
their writing is on the wall. How can you click “unfriend”?

Cleaning, I find
an old postcard from my long-gone grandmother, and it’s not a pretty postcard.
WTF was she doing in El Paso anyway? 
But it’s her handwriting, now a limited edition collector’s item. I
can’t throw it out, same as you don’t dare un-follow Elizabeth Taylor on
Twitter. It’s just rude.

Besides, a cyber
cemetery takes up no space and you don’t have to drive to get there. It’s
eco-friendly, and did I mention hygienic? Here you can visit their walls and
join the ultimate guest registry, grieving with others in a community of
commiseration. Sometimes (chronically), I check in to see who overshared.
Obsessing on Facebook — it’s more than just stalking your ex.

Their birthdays
arrive and I stop by to watch the nostalgia and miss yous and “oh girl, you
would not believe!” scroll in. At times, usually drunk, I head to those walls
to type something maudlin or to read the latest testaments and platitudes and
humanity. “I finally got that job,” “Kathleen is getting married,” “Because of
you, I want to live.”

Sentiments like
these make me want to create a profile page for all the dearly departed. We
could connect, suggest friends, and memorialize them within the online patchwork
quilt of a not-so-social networking website. They can all live on Deadbook. But to have them mixing and
mingling here with us?

It might be
different if they were on the man-haunt. If one had the foresight to bequeath
passwords and name ghostwriters, one could — Jesus was right! — live eternally.
They’d play vampire wars, share posts about quantum physics, definitely RSVP
“attending” to the Fetish Ball. My friends might have gotten a kick out of
that.

Wondering what
they might have wanted raises a question we may all one day have to answer.
Another heady end-of-life care question alongside whether you’d like to be
revived if you stop breathing or if you’ll donate your corneas. Do you want
us to pull the plug on your Facebook page?  

Do I pull that
plug on the suicide, the aneurysm, and the overdose? Could they care?
Cyberspace doesn’t exist any more than they do. It only lingers, pregnant in the
void, a virtual reminder to tell the living what you’re saving for their wall
once they’re gone.

 Jesse Archer is an award-winning writer, actor, and rabble-rouser who can be found at Jesse on the Brink.