Death

The viewing of the movie Bambi is one of modern society's ritual introductions of death to children. It's a difficult concept to explain. As a young child, in probably first or second grade, I recall having spent many long hours, including many nights where it was hard to get to sleep, obsessing about death. I did the math and worked out that most people live to at least sixty or seventy or some impossibly large age like that. Whatever the number, I recall finally coming to the conclusion that it was something like ten lifetimes away. A comfortably long time. Nothing to worry about. And time passes slower when you're a kid, too, so that added to the buffer I felt.

As a teenager, I lost my dad suddenly, to a drunk driver. I had never really known people to die. I came to see death differently. It almost wasn't the thing itself. That was quick. But it was the staying dead that was hard to grapple with. I recall sometime later being frustrated that he was still dead. Death is so darned permanent.

It's part of growing up, I suppose, to grapple with the fact that part of life is death. The fact that it can happen. We'd like to believe it can't. We try to ignore it lest it consume us full-time all the time, but then it hits all the harder if it does. We do not allow ourselves to conceive of the loss of any one of us. It's too complicated to imagine all the adjustments we'd have to make, so we put it off until we have to.

Cyberspace adds an odd wrinkle, too. We often don't recognize the societal texture it creates nor think of those among us who make it up. We're apes and used to looking into the eyes of our friends. I started using the net in 1977 and had my first telecommuting job in 1978. I had net friends from all around the country. And I think it was in 1979 when the one named UNCOLA (our user names were 6 letters or fewer, in all capital letters), who had written the UNTALK program—a fancy version of a talk program that allowed two people to have a split screen, typing in one half of the screen and reading the typing of the other person in the other half of the screen—committed suicide. He left a note in the description part of his login ID saying “see you on the dark side of the moon.” Friends of mine who followed the music of the time explained to me that this was a lyrical reference. With that brief statement, he was gone. Not a close friend, but someone I knew. A reminder of the tenuous human fabric that makes up our lives, and how easily it is torn.

In my mind, I recall it as him dying “on the net,” though of course he died in the real world and I just learned about it on the net. But our friends live on the net, and so in our perception they die there, too.

Sometimes when people die I am sad for them, but once in a while another emotion crosses my mind that I'm never quite sure what to make of. I think “at least no one can bother them any more” or “they have finally become what they were to become.” It's possible to view life as a process that has ended, but it's also possible to view it as creating something that transcends one's time. One builds the best legacy one can, and then one leaves it to stand on its own. I never used UNTALK without thinking of UNCOLA.

The Counting

I worked for a company, Symbolics, for a long time in the 1980's and into the early 1990's, when it finally went bankrupt. How I personally fared in all of that is a tale for another day, but what's relevant at this moment is that suddenly at one point there were layoffs. People didn't understand this well because in those days you only got fired for cause, and layoffs were a new thing to us. Someone getting fired usually meant they were people you didn't like anyway, and might be happy to see go away. But this was people who were our family, who we didn't want to go, who were torn from us abruptly, like a death. They brought in grief counsellors, who over a matter of weeks helped the staff who remained behind to adjust. It was a long, complicated thing coming to grips with the issue.

Unfortunately, layoffs at Symbolics didn't happen just once. They happened again, and again many more times, as the company dwindled in size from more than a thousand to less than 200, and we all became more efficient at coping. After a while, one knew the signs. One checked quickly to see if they were in the crew of people staying or going. People staying went to the room where they announced the casualties. People who'd been cut went to their offices to pack. Everyone back to work and life moving on by 11am. No more grief counselling. Just business cranking along.

I'm reminded of some movie I saw once, and a quote I'd love to relate with exactness. Only the essence of it sticks in my brain. It was a reference to World War I, which the person referred to by saying something like, “We called it the Great War, before we had the presence of mind to realize we needed to number them.” I guess the thing that struck me about that is that when the first of something happens, one often doesn't think “first of many,” or if they do some friend gives them grief about being at least negative if not an outright doomsayer.

In my mind, I still think of UNCOLA as a unique case. Death almost defines him. He is the one that died. But we all will. And there will not be so much ceremony for the others. Society cannot afford it. That event was for our community a kind of collective viewing of Bambi, a realization that it could happen. After that, we were not as much children as we had been.

Recently with the death of Dakini Dancer, this community endured the same. I didn't know her but I understand the void she left, with the sudden realization among people here that it could and would happen. Kellylark's If YOU Die, How Will I know? grapples with the problem directly, for example. Many others wrote their tributes.

At least in a place like Open Salon there is a legacy of writing that we all leave to the future, and so upon our death we can say we have become something and left something. Even those of us without religion can have an afterlife here, as we do in all the people and places our lives have touched.

What Mourning We Afford

Many tributes were expressed to Dakini, but I'll bet that not as much will be said when others die later. There are too many in the community and the community will not bear a two day period of mourning for each of us that falls away. That isn't to begrudge the time spent on marking Dakini's passing, but rather to say to those whose personal friends are not similarly heralded in the future, this doesn't mean those people are less of value.

Part of what people are going through right now is the loss of an individual. And that loss is real. But partly they are working through the concept that loss can and will happen. And they will become, of necessity, practiced at that, as we were at Symbolics when layoff after layoff caused each of our hearts to ball up and insulate us from the human aspects of the casualties around us.

This would happen for any such trauma.

We are outraged by Hurricane Katrina, but I sometimes find strange comfort in the notion that there are so few Katrinas thus far—that they still have names and not just numbers. I'm not bullish on Climate Change and so, doomsayer that I seem to have become, I expect worse things to become more common, and for us to look back on Katrina and long for the day when we could confront such problems one at a time. If Climate Change worsens, and more cities suffer problems, the reactions of other cities in the future may well be “leave us alone, we have our own problems.”

We bemoaned the loss of the twin towers in New York because we had the luxury of time in which to do so. Had there been more such attacks, we might quickly have learned we didn't have the time. We fight wars in which any given day may be, for those who participate, as horrific as 9/11. But we don't mourn the individual days and events. We compartmentalize it, package it up, aggregate and consolidate it—all ways to keep from individually confronting the details at a level we all know is morally called for, but that we all know would bring civilization to a standstill if we had to do.

At some point, life is for the living, and so we budget a day—or perhaps a weekend—per year to look back on all that has come before us, and then we get on about life.

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