I’m never sure which should go first when writing about death and disappearance–the facts or the eulogy. I don’t mean to be needlessly dark or unintentionally callous when skirting the edge of a sensitive and real topic.
Throughout the semester, I may lament the lack of “realness” on the internet, but in the case of death and disappearance, I can get profoundly sad, and my sadness is at its core bitterness, choking frustration–dispirited anger.
Maybe I should start this again: on the morning of September 9th, a longtime friend of mine died from pancreatic cancer. Notifications went off on Facebook, where I read five paragraphs of raw grief from their fiancĂ©. Word docs for unattended assignments were open but empty. I missed my office hours. My stomach hurt. I sat and stared at my laptop, opening and closing the lid, and I didn’t start my homework for the day until late in the afternoon.
A longtime friend, a supportive person–a trans elder.
In 2010, after I first came out as trans, I didn’t know any trans people in real life. Whenever I used Facebook at the library, I would join and scroll through groups. I don’t remember when I friended them, or if I requested to be their friend first, but I know that we have been each other’s silent supporters for close to a decade.
My family doesn’t know about them; my partner doesn’t know about them; but I will always be grateful for the reactions they left on my posts, and how they wished me a happy birthday–with love and at least one heart emoji–every year.
This isn’t the first time a trans elder and friend has died. I remember logging into Facebook while my brother used one of the computers next to me. I remember sniffing loudly. One of the proudest gay trans men who encouraged me and others in the groups, opening his heart and resources to us–dead.
That time and other times trans and cis friends have died and left their Facebook account behind, loved ones have had to assume their likeness, their profile, to announce their death, changing profile pictures. There’s this digital wake period where we see the person in their best selfies and in-the-wild pics, stories about them flowing from keyboards and touchscreens in many different places. Apparently there’s a process on FB for turning a living account into a memorial.
After I read the pre-eulogy, I unfriended my friend. Maybe that was part of the shock, too. There’s been enough death.
One of my brothers in New York has grieved in his own way on Twitter as many trans elders in the capital have died, especially to COVID. I wonder how Twitter death works. Do you ever go away on Twitter?
On Tumblr, there are many posts written by ghosts being liked and reblogged. Unless someone logs into an account and deactivates it manually, there’s no way to verify who the author is and then ask for that account to be deactivated. There are a growing number of posts by shocked people seeing something a dead friend wrote show up on their dashboard again and again and again. Currency is undervalued on Tumblr.
Death and disappearance has become a political issue on social media. In addition to efforts to readjust accounts after someone has died, many social issues have been raised on platforms like Twitter, like the search for missing and murdered Indigenous women (#MMIW). People have raised concerns about sharing videos of the violent murders of Black people on social media, raising that they don’t want to be remembered because of how they died or have their image used posthumously. Accounts will be disappearing from Facebook soon as they enact a new rule about not allowing users who have been banned in any sense before to keep their accounts.
Who has the right to your intellectual properties? Who has a right to your body, even reflections and expressions not attached to the solid core of who you are by ligament? Who has the final “yes” or “no” on letting you leave this world completely?
I hope our social media accounts are being used to build up legacy capital, proof that we were here and did something. Or being used as an archival after-life for future study. Our lives are being consumed by demands of the consumer to network in all tech they can get their hands on and building an identity on the web before it is defined for us. I hope our deaths aren’t been absorbed into that project.