Facebook and the Dead

I’m going to write about death and social networking.  Within the last year I’ve lost three friends to cancer.  This really sucks.  I know death is inevitable, but I don’t have to like any aspect of it.  Since they saw death coming they all “made a good end” as Ophelia says.  They had bucket lists and the ability to do most of the things on them.  They had parties to celebrate their lives, their friends, families and their children.  There was music, art and poetry.  One chose assisted suicide, the other two had access to good hospice drugs so, as far as we can tell from the outside, physical suffering wasn’t an issue at the end.  This, of course, is different from the profound and horrific suffering that has accompanied death through most of time and place on our planet.  Despite these good ends, I still hate the huge gaping hole that is left when they are gone, not to mention the stunning reminder of my own mortality and the fragility of all the lives around me that I love. 

So I turn to facebook. 

I notice an interesting thing begins to happen.  The facebook page of a dead person seems to go through a consistent transformation.  First it becomes a digital gathering place for people to leave condolences for the bereaved.  After some time has passed, posts transition to statements of praise and appreciation for the person who has passed.  After still more time passes posts begin to be addressed directly to the dead: “found a picture of us…,” “went to such a place where we…,” “was singing a song and thought of you…”  Five months after one friend had passed he had accepted the friend requests of over forty new people!  Finally, I have noticed that people are posting as if the dead person were still in communication – birthday greetings, events “Visiting the coast. Wish you were here.” “Hope things are going well for you in your new life.  Bet you are putting on quite a show up there!” 

The way we communicate has changed radically in the last ten years, but we are still tribal creatures.  We sit at computer screens in the gathering dark of an awesome, terrifying universe.  As a globe we each huddled around our flame in this digital community fire, while an invisible host of the living and the dead sits at our elbow.

The Missing Piece

I am deep cleaning my house this summer.  We moved to Colorado from Connecticut four years ago.  We packed in a hurry, scooping up whatever came to hand and filling box after box.  Although we gave away a lot of stuff I remember marveling, as I packed, at the amount of junk we still had: clothes that were no longer worn, papers that were probably not that important, a favorite puzzle with a missing piece.  We unpacked in a hurry as well, and dove into our new lives.  

New house, new job, new schools and end of life care for my parents all eclipsed house cleaning in priority.  This means that at the start of this summer the boy’s room, whose youngest occupant is now eight, still had shelves filled with the favorite toys of a four year old.   Alphabet blocks and electronic Lego kits competed for space.  The floor was ankle deep in school papers and hot wheel cars.  The boys went to camp the third week in June and I plunged in with a large shovel, determined to create order out of chaos.  I became a whirlwind of organization.  Papers were shredded and recycled, toys given to friends with younger children. After I had vacuumed I sat still and quiet on their little couch for a long time just relishing the calm and the order.   I ran my fingers absentmindedly back and forth along the edge of the clean rug when my forefinger detected one last piece of junk.  I yanked it out from under the rug with a shout of disgust and then stopped as I beheld a marvel.  I held one small jigsaw piece belonging to a detailed puzzle of the solar system.  I, of course, knew where the puzzle was now but this piece had gone missing about ten years ago, when my eldest was eight!  It had moved in the ebb and flow of small pieces of junk, from one child’s toy box to another’s drawer.  It had survived the babyhood of two inquisitive toddlers, a move halfway across the country and my recent take no prisoners vacuum job.  I don’t know if it is a metaphor for something profound or just a sign of my insanity in letting all these little drawers full of odds and ends remain in our lives.  But Oh!  What a feeling of satisfaction when I put that piece back in its puzzle.

Heat

The Walk from the Pool to the Bike

Heat

Kisses my chilled skin

Crisp with chlorine

Legs swing and melt

Into each gravel crunch

Heat

Seeps in deep

Soaks the very marrow

Breaths come so full and smooth

One more and I could fly

Heat

Slips through my hair

Flutters the skirt

Loose around my knees

Heat

Drenches slanting shadows

Lilies soused with gold

Overarch my path

Heat

Bakes into cricket’s trills

Into the Cicadian waves

That break on my ears

Like the sea

Heat

Pulls out the languid lilt

Of the sunset robin

A moon is rising

Rich as cream and

Full to bursting

P.S.

This perfect summer moment is brought to you in memory of Spalding Gray and his never-ending search for perfect moments.

Settling into Summer

            Summer has started and every year I wrestle with finding the rhythm of that particular summer.  I always have a list of millions of things I’m anxious to do; tasks, projects and even celebrations put off during the all-consuming school year.  Every year I worry whether I’ll be able to discipline myself into a workable routine and stick to it flexibly enough to have plenty of spontaneous fun but also accomplish at least some of my goals.

In the old movie “So Dear to My Heart” a boy is wondering how to find wild honey so he can sell some to the local shopkeeper.  The shopkeeper tells him “Just find a bee and follow it to its hive.”  The boy leaves and the shopkeeper’s friend chides him “You just don’t care how you waste that boy’s time.”  To which the shopkeeper replies, “What is time to a boy?”  I miss that feeling from childhood, that summer was endless and full of possibilities for quest and triumph.  But as I get older I am more and more conscious of the urgency of time pressing in on me.  The more I fret, the less gets done.  So, to the first task of the summer: Saturday I took my oldest daughter to take her SAT tests. On the drive there we saw an enormous bird fly low across the road just ahead.  It was a raptor, the largest I had ever seen flying in the wild.  It was being ‘dive-bombed’ by three or four small dark birds, but as it passed us it soared away, easily out flying its tormentors.  I thought it must be a golden eagle, but its wings were mottled with white.  I had never seen a golden eagle in flight before, just perched in captivity, where they are a smooth golden brown.  At home I looked it up in the bird book.  I think it really was a golden eagle. 

            That evening I took a bike ride to a local lake with my eleven-year-old son.  We live in such a beautiful place.  We saw avocets and egrets, white pelicans and killdeers, prairie dogs and even a beaver swimming across the far side of the lake with a branch in its mouth.  As we were standing by the lake, I looked to my left and saw a large grey brown mottled mass on the branch just next to me.  I wondered for a moment if it was an odd-looking hornets nest when it turned its head and I found myself looking into the yellow gold eyes of a great horned owl.  I quietly tapped my son on the shoulder and we both looked at the owl till it silently left the branch and glided out across the lake.  I am hopeful it will be a good summer.

School's Out

School finished yesterday.  All my reports are done and I left my room and desk spotless.  Now the summer stretches before me full of potential and here I sit, at a bright yellow table in a hip independent coffee shop.  My daughter is taking the SAT and I am waiting for her.  I thought I’d write a bit.  First I clean out my iPhoto; all the photos from a school year’s worth of adventures with remarkable students.  I think about writing something meaningful, wrapping up the school year and getting literary closure. I am overwhelmed by the thought.  I finish a chocolate croissant - forty minutes have passed.  I clean out the e-mail – another thirty minutes taken care of.  I finish my tea.  TEDx Denver has finally posted the April talks on Youtube.  I learn how to post Libby’s talk (the amazing woman from the S.A.M.E. Café) on my facebook wall – twenty minutes.  It is simply wonderful how easy it is to distract myself with worthy online chores when I sit down to write.  I have two goals this summer: write everyday and clean my house to a depth. Well, in truth, I have many goals, many, many, many; too many to accomplish in ten weeks.  But my main goal is to reign in my scattered self and really accomplish these two. I know the writing is possible because I did write everyday in March. The house – well, I’ll let you know.

Wandering Planets

Today I worked with students studying the mythology of ancient Greece and then with a student studying astrobiology.  You wouldn’t think there would be much of a connection, aside from the names of the planets, would you?  Now I do admit that I have a bit of a predilection for threading topics together with connections as thin as spider’s filament, but don’t you think these coincidences would make good openers for some science fiction stories?

Venus, the goddess of love and beauty was married to Vulcan, the god of smiths and volcanoes, though she was always in love with Mars, the god of war.  Beneath the shining clouds of the morning star the planet Venus hides masses of active volcanoes on its hellishly hot surface.

Jupiter was well known for his amorous affairs and his jealous wife, Juno.  One of them was Io.  Poor Io.  Jupiter changed her into a sweet white calf to hide her from his wife, but Juno wasn’t fooled and spent several legends torturing the poor girl.  Io, the moon of Jupiter, is so stressed and heated by the tidal forces of it’s parent planet that the whole moon has literally been turned inside out over years of volcanic activity.  And this poor little moon is so small it can’t even keep hold of the atmosphere the volcanoes produce.  I suppose Io, the tortured little cow, could commiserate.

Europa was another of Jupiter’s loves.  Jupiter changed himself into a beautiful white bull, the legend says.  Europa, playing with her maidens on a North African beach, was so entranced that she jumped on the animal’s back, at which point the bull charged into the sea.  They crossed the Mediterranean and emerged from the ocean onto the continent that bears her name – thus the lady on the bull gracing the Belgian Euro in 2004.  Europa, the Jovian moon, is completely covered by a liquid ocean, possibly more ocean water, by volume than exists on Earth, encrusted completely with a miles thick layer of ice.

O.K. here is just one more, perhaps a bit of a stretch.  Pluto, the god of the underworld, was essentially god of his own mirror image world of the dead.  Pluto is miniscule, not even fully designated a planet anymore.  However, I just learned that this little body has it’s own system of three moons orbiting around it.  For some reason I had no trouble absorbing Jupiter’s system of sixty some odd moons, or any of the other gas giants' large collections of satellites.  But somehow Pluto, so far away and cold, barely bigger than a moon itself, just didn’t seem they type.  And yet there it is, locked in a tidal dance with Charon, a moon half Pluto’s size, the two bodies face each other and whirl around an invisible center.  Outside of their self-absorbed gaze, two other little moons flit around them, like cold ghostly fairies shades.

Cleaning the Yard on Palm Sunday

Lenten time is altogether spare

Long ago the pre-spring cupboard bare

Fasting till the greens popped up

And the chickens started laying

In the garden now I dig out winter’s must

Last year’s dead dissolved to naught but dust

Fat worms dark earth heedless sup

While robins trill a joyfully praising

I cast my eyes o’re wasted winter spent

Further back, through time that I’ve been lent

Spring sun warms my dissolute dust

Sublimates a soul exposed and bare