Yesterday I wrote about finding out that my dear friend of nearly 30 years had died, on Facebook. It was a terrible shock, after sharing such a close and intimate friendship for so long, to find out that way. I wrote about this on Facebook and many people responded. Since then I have had further thoughts, based on people’s sharings, and my own feelings as they have moved through the hours and days since hearing of Joseph’s passing.
First of all my mind goes to the many years, and there were many, that he and I talked every day. We would have coffee in the morning and talk about our writing and our lives and loves and heartaches and everything under the sun. When I lived in Colorado for a few months in 2000 he came and spent Thanksgiving week with me and we had the sweetest holiday together. I had visited he and his partner in New Mexico twice before that and even after they split up Joseph and I remained close. As the years went along we went through so many things together including, a few short years ago, his bout with a terrible cancer. We would talk when he was on his was to chemotherapy and radiation treatments. We texted daily during that time. But sometime after that his life took a difficult turn. It is not a secret. He wrote an amazing book called “Quitting Crystal Meth.” The second edition came out just this year, the website to go along with it has helped people around the world and the book was published in a number of languages as was his earlier book, “Living Our Dying” about living through the AIDS crisis and living fully while facing death. But those years when he was lost to drugs he pulled back and away as people with addiction often do. I didn’t know or understand anything about that world and he didn’t want me to know about it. He told me this later when he was clean and sober and his book was out and he was dedicated to helping people, and he helped so very many people.
We had begun to grow close again in the last year or two. When he called me on my birthday in April we laughed and talked for 2 hours and it felt just like old times. We talked again this summer about our writing, about publishing via amazon which he thought I should do, you will find his books there, and he was advising me how to handle things. And we communicated briefly on his birthday August 10 and were to have talked again but never did. I do not know what his last weeks were like, I do not know how or why he died, and it haunts me, but what I thought about, late last night, was that while it was an awful thing to find out on Facebook that he had died because of the fact that we weren’t in each other’s daily lives as we had been for so long, and he now lived in Palm Springs where he had a large close community of friends — I read on Facebook last night that they are having a celebration of his life there at the church he was involved with and I wrote to the pastor but don’t know if he will respond — those people didn’t know me, they didn’t know who Joseph and I were to each other for so long, they didn’t know that even 3 months ago we were telling each other how much we loved and missed each other, and I called him Joey as I always did, and he said, as he always did, “You know you are the only one whom I have ever let call me Joey.” And we laughed, and he was my sweet Joey, as always. But those people don’t know me.
The point is, if I had not seen it on Facebook I may not have known, for a very long time, that he was gone. When I thought about that a wave a shock went through my body, because I thought not just about Joseph but about many dear friends that I have made the last 20 years, online, and because I live alone and live a life mostly cut off from the real world in person most of my friends, and they are many, and very dear, and my students, well, they are all on Facebook, almost without exception (I can’t in this moment think of anyone in my life now who is not on Facebook. Even some of the last holdouts are now there.). I have written emails, just last night, to two very dear friends of mine, one of only the last year or two but one of nearly 20 years. One is in Belgium, the other Sweden, and if the time comes that something happens to either of them I will be devastated and how will I even know? These are women who live alone and who don’t have, I think, people who would even post their passing on Facebook. In a world where, if you are someone like me, and even if you have more of a life in the outside world you may still have very many friends and loved ones online, how are you to know?
And if someone close to you, that you love, like the person who posted Joseph’s death, know that there are many people who knew and loved him, that they will want and need to know, how else are you to deliver this sad information to so many people who knew and loved them so that they do not go months or longer not knowing that someone they cared about had passed? In this context I understand why I had to learn in this way. My Joey was gone, and the person who posted the news of his death did not know me, but knew that there were many people who needed to know. And we did need to know. A great many heartbroken, shocked people responded to that thread, they are still responding. And none of us would have known, or not very soon, if it had not been posted in that manner.
And then if I, say, passed, my children, knowing that most of my world was online, my friends, my students, people very dear to me, and that these people would want to know, but my children would have no way of knowing who these people were, and their only recourse, if they had the presence of mind amidst their grief, and I hope and think they would, to post something, would have no other recourse but to put something online. On Facebook, they wouldn’t know how to post on my blog I don’t think. What else would they do?
It has all made me very sad. We live in a very different world today than the world in which Joseph and I became friends before there even was an online world. And even when there was Joey and I were real life friends who talked on the phone and visited one another many times in person, who shared meals and holidays and tears and heartbreaks, who knew one another’s families and partners… until we didn’t anymore. And sadly, in the end, we didn’t, not closely enough to be contacted personally. In today’s world there was no other way I could have found out but on Facebook.
And then, there is something else…
At 6:00 this morning, after having awakened sometime past 4:00, frightened and feeling very alone and having a hard time, I turned on my phone as I do in the middle of the night when I am wakeful and afraid. I wrote the following on Facebook…
“I know you’re not supposed to get on your phone, on Facebook, in the middle of the night, well it’s past 6 now, but when you feel afraid and alone it sure helps to feel connected. I will try to go back to sleep now, I just kind of wanted to reach out and touch my friends. I have struggled terribly with finding out that my dear friend died in this medium but here I am here when I feel alone and afraid. It’s a whole new world today, this is still a young medium. It hurts and it heals. We don’t yet know and understand fully how to use it. I find myself perplexed at times and very grateful at others. I think I may write more about this on my blog today. For now I will try to go back to sleep. I love and appreciate you all so much. I hope I am not always alone, it is so hard, but you all being there helps so much…”
… and many people responded. I was still reading them after I got up this morning. And it saved me. And it made me less afraid and less alone. So without this sometimes iffy medium, where I learned that one of the dearest friends of my lifetime died, I would also not have a place to go when I was alone and afraid in the middle of the night. Most times, when I am wakeful, I don’t write in and I am too tired to respond but just scanning through the posts — and I am often comforted to see a number of other friends also wakeful and posting in the middle of the night — makes me feel that I am not as alone in the world as I am feeling in that moment, and if it is a “virtual world” it is the world in which I spend most of my time and without which I would barely have a life. Is it not, then, appropriate that I found out, late Sunday afternoon, that my beloved Joey had died, on Facebook?
This is the world that we live in today, I am having a hard time making sense of it all but in this moment I understand a little better. It doesn’t make it easier, but I do begin to understand, and that’s something. We come to embrace the world in which we live or we don’t and if we don’t we don’t fit anywhere. I need to fit somewhere. This is so very hard.
I find myself increasingly puzzled, and often consoled, by this strange, online world we inhabit. Two of our grandchildren just popped upstairs to borrow a wok and share news of their school day. In early 2019 that will no longer be possible, as they will have returned to Australia. We had dinner with all four grandchildren and their parents last night, an easy flow of love and laughter that will be carved in half when the two older children return to Oz. We will stay connected with Facetime, but we will lose the hugs, the spontaneous connections, the intimate gatherings. I would not go back to pre-Internet days, when those we loved were lost to us forever by time or space or complicated lives. Those were days when we might never have learned of the passage of distant friends. Still, there is something achingly impersonal about learning something so personal via social media.
Oh dear Cathryn I am so happy that you have had this precious time with your grandchildren. It is so hard for me to have 2 of my 3 children living so far away and I tell you FaceTime and the internet are what make it bearable at all (Even though it is STILL really hard for me.) so I know that it will be hard for you when they leave. And I would have been devastated to find out that Joseph died a year from now because there was no other way for me to know. It is a blessing in its way even while its hard to take. We are from a different era Cathryn when things felt more personal. But here we are, now, and this is what we have, and there are many benefits and blessings. I am trying, hard, right now, to hold on to that, the benefits and the blessings. But yes, it was a gut punch to read on social media that someone I loved so much had just passed. Maybe, now, knowing that this is a possibility, a way that I might find out such news, it will be a little easier, but then it is never easy to hear that someone we love has died, no matter how we hear. My Joey is gone and there would have been no good way to hear that news.
Thank you for being here Cathryn, it was so good to see you here tonight. I would love it if we could do a video chat again sometime when you have the time. I loved talking with you. Take care honey, enjoy your family…