| The other day I realised that a friend died.
When I say "friend" I should really say "acquaintance". I went to highschool with her, but we weren't exceptionally close. She got in touch via Facebook not too long after I set up an account, and we did a little bit of catching up... she'd been married a few years, had stepkids and I think at least one of her own, living in Brisbane, happy, busy, etc... but we didn't have much communication after that. Then a message popped up in my newsfeed - under her name, but the poster explained she was Sylvia's step-daughter, just putting a message up on her stepmother's birthday as a way of staying connected to her. That was when I realised she'd died. I went to her profile page & read through her newsfeed history, wondering what had happened. And the whole story is charted out there in messages from friends and status posts... Sylvia is very tired... is home sick with the kids... going to doc to find out why I'm so sick... sending me for tests... ER don't know what's wrong... more tests... surgery... feeling better... feeling worse... messages from family: Sylvia is in hospital... would love visitors... doing better... more surgery... fighting... x-rays... still fighting... we're keeping her comfortable... messages from friends: get well... thinking of you... good to see you the other day... glad you're feeling better, you'll make it through this... sorry you're things aren't going well... sorry I wasn't around more often... RIP... thinking of your family... all over two years. Along there way there was one mention of what killed her: a brain tumor. Facebook is a strange thing. Once upon a time, all those thoughts and fears would be temporary, lost on the wind and remembered only by those whom they belonged to. But now there's a record. A fragile one, admittedly. But a record nonetheless. Is it what I would want, if I were dying? My story, told in statuses and I'm sorry's and short messages sent on my behalf, and left to be read by anyone who cared to? Would I NOT want that? Strange. If I had died a year ago, it would have been swift and sudden - no history of temporary recoveries and slow declines, no hopeful test results to post or be read by passing acquaintances. Is that important to me? I'm not sure. Probably I'd prefer that my health history wasn't charted out for posterity and random perusal - that's why I put very little up about being unwell at all. Strange. Just... strange. Very, very strange. |
