DEATH IN THE AGE OF TECHNOLOGY

A friend died the other day.  Breast cancer that spread too far, too fast.  But she had her dukes up the whole way; fought a damned good fight.  She stood tall, battled elegantly, thrusting and parrying at the disease like the most elegant of fencers.  I know there must have been ugly days, days of railing at the fates and wondering “why me?”  But she chose not to show most of us those days.  She moved through the world with giant grace; with her chin up, a twinkle in her eye and a sense of good humor.

I stumbled across the email entry for her in my computer the other day and my fingers froze.  My heart constricted.  There she was, I thought.  Living proof.  Was she really gone?  No more replies to my emails or Face book messages?  For just a millisecond I moved to delete the entry and then stopped.  I wasn’t ready to press that button and say “yes” when my computer asked me if I really wanted to do this.  I wasn’t there yet.

How does one “delete” a friend in this age of technology? What about Face book?  Do you “un-friend” someone after they die?  It seemed so final.  So I chose to do nothing.  I declared a period of memoriam in cyberspace.  She would live on there, until I was ready to let her go.

In the old days, back when people like me walked barefoot to school and got wooden teeth, you had physical address books. You could hold them in your hand and flip the pages alphabetically, long before computers organized that information for you.  When someone moved or died or just no longer really featured themselves in your life, you would erase them, cross them out.  And in this simple act you could still see the traces of them there—the ghost of the person.  Like a reflection or a shadow.  This was the final step before obsolete.  Sort of an “un-dead.”

But now everything is instant, electronic, immediate.  It’s so simple to add or delete.  Things happen inadvertently.  The first time I faced this issue was when our friend David Bloom died in Iraq in 2003 while covering the invasion of Baghdad.  I remember stumbling across his contact information at NBC, his work number and cell.  It was a hard slap to see the computer scrolling past his name in the “B” s.  What to do?  David was gone.  The silence was deafening.

I didn’t dwell.  I decided (by not taking action) that death in the technology age required a period of mourning.  I would keep David’s entry there until I had processed the death, lived with it, grieved it and accepted it, as much as one can accept death.  Just having him alive in my laptop and cell phone somehow kept David present.  The David Bloom entry was my proof that he had existed at all.

I haven’t had to deal with more than my fair share of death yet.  I don’t know what one’s fair share is.  But I know there are families and towns for whom death and loss has been more of a frequent companion.

For an old gal, I’ve been relatively unscathed.  My first was a fatal car accident involving my high school friend -- a boy--- who was a prince among men.  I didn’t go to that funeral in Buffalo, New York and I will always kick myself.  I was in college at the time, couldn’t figure out the transportation, didn’t understand quite the weight of ceremony.  No one talked about “closure” the way they do now, but I suppose all these years later my lack of attendance haunts me for that reason.  I needed to be there to lay him to rest too.   

I missed both of my grandmothers’ funerals as well.  During one I was out of the country, the other, across the country with a newborn.   The trip and leaving a baby seemed impossible back then; we’d just made a move to a new town.  I was overwhelmed and I’d said my goodbyes to her not long before.   I look back now and wish I’d made more effort.  Those passages are important.  They don’t seem so when you are younger and lives stretch out like red carpets. 

Looking now through the rear view mirror, I understand that ceremonies offer a sense of completion and celebration of living.  They are a tender act; the way women lovingly wash the feet and bodies of the dead. There was a time in America where you kept the body at home for the wake, dressed your loved one, held them as they died.  In the parts of the world where people are not as removed from the cycles of birth and death, they speak of the comfort brought by this proximity to the departed.

We don’t get up close to death like that anymore. That’s mostly handled by others; professionals in hospitals and hospice.  It’s a job, a career.  It’s not dissimilar to the way we buy our meat in the supermarket, already slaughtered, butchered and wrapped in plastic.  We sub-contract out the messy parts.

Looking at a dead friend’s contact information in my computer is a little bit like that.  It’s an industrial, sanitized entry, no pen marks or wine stains on the page.  It’s too easy to hit the button and move on.  A bunch of keystrokes cannot, certainly, constitute the essence of  the person who lived, laughed and loved.  And so, in defiance of all that is so efficient and easy and destructive in this age of technology, I will stage a sit-in for her in cyberspace.  I will keep her alive in my hard drive for as long as I choose.  There will come a day, when I’m cleaning out my address list, adding and deleting, that I will finally let her go.  But right now, I’m still content to catalogue her as a “friend.”  

The New Yorker on 'Heroes'

Tad Friend of The New Yorker recently published a wonderful profile on the work we do for Remind.org.  You can read the full article here and I'd love your feedback!

We admire people who can do something we can’t. If we wish we could do that thing, too—or are very glad we don’t have to—then we call those people heroes. Hero worship beamed in all directions at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre the other night during “Stand Up for Heroes,” a benefit for Bob Woodruff’s foundation, which aids wounded veterans. (Woodruff, an ABC News correspondent, was himself badly wounded in Iraq in 2006.) The show’s array of stars had other stars crowding in backstage to watch. “It’s a little Rat Pack-y thing,” Max Weinberg, Bruce Springsteen’s longtime drummer, said. When Tony Bennett sang “The Best Is Yet to Come,” Springsteen was humming along, just offstage. “Fabulous,” he said about Bennett’s swingy, catfooted phrasing. “Fabulous! I do not want to follow Tony Bennett.”

But he did, ripping into “Open All Night,” backed by Weinberg’s fifteen-piece band. Bob Woodruff stood in the wings, bobbing on the downbeats. “You can’t top this,” he told his wife, Lee, who was shimmying in a purple dress. Nearby, Jon Stewart, the evening’s host, was pounding the air drums alongside a wary Jerry Seinfeld, who stood with his arms crossed. When Springsteen hopped onto the Steinway to play a few licks, the crowd went crazy, and Stewart leaned toward Seinfeld and said, “If you could do that, you would. That’s what you would do.” After a moment, Seinfeld nodded.

Keep Reading on The New Yorker

The Humble Mascot

Over the past few years, I’ve traveled to university towns in the nation’s heartland numerous times.  Although I’m an easterner by birth, I feel at ease in the plain states.  But it wasn’t until I recently spoke at the University of Minnesota, home of the Golden Gophers, that an observation about the mid-west suddenly jumped to the forefront of my brain.   The dots connected.

Who had chosen the mascots at some of these big mid-western schools?  The gopher and some of its regional rivals, seemed to be in a category better recognized as annoyances, pests or animals simply destined for road kill.

Let me just admit up front that I am NOT a sports person.  My son and husband think it’s humorous to throw a team name at me and ask……no, not where they are from.  I’m more hopeless than that.  They quiz me on what CATEGORY of sport it is.  I’m about 75%.

But the mascot thing was way more interesting to me than the sports themselves. Gophers in Minnesota, Badgers in Wisconsin, the Wolverines in Michigan, (is that even a real animal or is it the Chihuahua of wolves?)  Illinois State has the Red Birds, (decorative) Jay Hawks symbolized the University of Kansas and University of Ohio trumpeted the Buckeyes.  How do you fight a nut, for pete’s sake?  How do you even make that into a costume the spirit team can wear?

Nebraska’s Corn Huskers were perplexing but understandable.  But who the heck wanted to go up against a team known for repetitive food preparation?  I discovered the Foresters of Lake Forest College.  They sounded like an industrious lot, clearing acreage and all, but that didn’t seem particularly competitive.

Where I come from back East, mascots are ballsy animals, spoiling for a fight.  Tigers in Princeton, Yale had the Bull Dogs, Brown the Brown Bears, and my personal alma mater, the Colgate Red Raiders.

Even small schools chose fighters like Bucknell’s Bison or the Bates Bob Cat, animals known for mixing it up.  The list went on with spit and vinegar.  But what had happened in the mid-west?  Was this simply a case of the region’s good natured and understated humility? 

Personally, I liked the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame.  Finally, a mascot I could relate to. OK, so maybe it gave Irish descendants like me a bad name, as if we already didn’t have  the drunken brawling stereotype to contend with.  But in my opinion, a drunken fighter doing rope-a-dope still wins out over a badger, gopher, nut or an ear of corn.

When I investigated further, I found many other more appropriate competitive symbols;  Braves and Indians, Warriors, Rebels, Marauders, Cavaliers, Cowboys, Crusaders , Knights and Privateers, Raiders and Rebels, Savages and Saxons, Spartans, Trojans and Vikings.  There were also smaller but determined mascots, like Hornets and Yellow Jackets.  Things you hit with a rolled up newspaper.

Scary bad guys like Devils and Demons proliferated.  There were do-gooders too, teams with the Lord on their side; Saints and Bishops, Quakers, Cardinals, and hearty Pioneers.  I was confused by the Battling Bishops of Ohio Weslyan.  It seemed a little contradictory to be a man of the cloth and put up your dukes. 

I personally liked the animals, especially the feline family. There were Tigers, Cats, Bob Cats, Lions, Panthers, Wildcats and then other fierce fighters like Bison, Eagles, Bears, Rams, and Broncos. Pittsburgh State had the Gorilla, an animal not usually associated with Pennsylvania or steel.

One of the most perplexing mascots, however, was the “Blue Hose” of Presbyterian College.  I prefer to think that this is about colonial stockings and not a garden implement, or worse, a glib sexual reference.  This would probably be one of the few sweatshirts my daughter would NOT beg me to buy during a college campus visit.

Weather patterns like Cyclones, Hurricanes, and Tornados were common.  And added to that list of “difficult and uncomfortable mascot costumes” was simply the Green Terror at McDaniel College.  The name conjured up images of plagues, nerve gas and Centers for Disease Control. 

With a total right-brained lack of imagination, engineering schools, like RPI, and MIT came up with……..yes,  “The Engineers,”  battling rivals with pocket protectors, power strips and duct taped glasses.

Faced with the complete list of college and university mascots, I began to see the reasoning in the mid west’s Big 10 decision to choose kindler, gentler animals.  Maybe if you weren’t so full of yourselves, you’d actually psych out the opponent.   Perhaps so many smaller schools picked giant-sized, bone-crunching Tomahawk wielding mascots out of a Napolean complex.    How humbling to be badly trounced if you are The Golden Eagles, Wildcats or Razorbacks.  Better to low-ball the competitive expectation with, say the humble nature of a Badger, Cardinal, or for heaven’s sake, a Buckeye. And then  --  WHAM -- cut’em off at the knees. 

It was the recent experience of running into my new friend Chip, one of the regulars at my local dog park, that drove home the importance of selecting an appropriate mascot. Usually hatless, he was wearing a baseball cap that said  “COCKS” in giant stitching.  I knew Chip was newly divorced, and as I warily moved closer for inspection, I wondered if Chip might fare better in the dating department if he just got a T-shirt and drew arrows pointing at his groin.

“That’s quite a hat,” I said, figuring I needed to tackle this head on.

“Yeah,” said Chip.  “That’s my team.”

“Oh,” I said relieved, as I read the tiny print “University of South Carolina” above the cap’s brim and bent to pick up the steaming poop my dog had just deposited.

“What a, um, great hat, “ I said to Chip, instantly re-evaluating the wisdom of mid-western mascots.

“Sure is,” he beamed.