You might see a ghost or two tonight.
It’s true. A handful of shorter spirits seem to wander the streets every Oct. 31, trying to scare up a Butterfinger or two. Some of these spooks go for more of a simple, classic look—a sheet draped over the body just so. Others want to make a greater fashion statement, accessorizing their gear with gore and blood and perhaps a meat cleaver.
However they’re dressed, these candy-carrying phantoms are difficult to ignore. And if you try, they’ll just keep pressing on your doorbell button.
But that just makes sense, I suppose. Death itself is pretty unavoidable—even when we try. And we try really hard.
Oh, looking at the culture, we seem to wallow in death. On television, it’s a rare drama that doesn’t feature a dead body every week. Some of ’em even get up and walk around—even though they’re typically looking for more than Butterfingers. AMC’s The Walking Dead is cable’s most popular show, for example. And Fox’s new Sleepy Hollow features a fearsome headless antagonist. (How he can fire off those machine guns with any accuracy is, really, beyond comprehension.)
But for all the death and dying we see in prime time, not much of it touches us. Writes Time’s James Poniewozik:
Life is cheap on TV, or rather death is—it’s plentiful, showy, devoid of realism or consequence. But ordinary death is a blank spot in our pop memory, one we’ve filled with monsters and explosions. After a steady diet of Hollywood deaths, real ones—the labored breathing, the body becoming a slack husk—seem uncanny, alien.
We’re exposed to death all the time, it seems. Sometimes it would seem we bathe in it, particularly this time of year. And yet we avoid it too. We run away from it. It’s rare for us to deal with death in any real way these days—to look it square in the eyes. It is a paradox of the human soul, I suppose: Just as some turn to porn to escape intimacy, we party amid tombstones because we fear the grave.
As Christians, of course, we have nothing to fear. Death, we’re told, has lost its sting. In fact, it’s a release—a door opening to Home.
But let’s not kid ourselves: As much as we know this to be true, we still feel the loss that death brings. When a loved one passes, we feel the hole their passing leaves in our heart. When we think about our own demise, we can’t help but think about the people we’ll leave behind. After all, we grow attached to this life (even in all its imperfections). And whatever heaven holds, we don’t want to be forgotten here on earth. We concentrate on our legacies, make out our wills, write down our memoires. And sometimes we spend fortunes even on our gravesites, hoping that they’ll give us a measure of earthbound immortality.
When I visited Westminster Abbey in London some years back, I was amazed at the number of tombs found therein. For centuries, Britain’s rich and powerful commemorated themselves with the most extravagant tombs—self-professed Christians who, even as their souls sped toward paradise, wanted to remind people of their physical place on earth. Some of those buried in Westminster left behind more than a tombstone, of course: The kings and queens there, Elizabeth I and Henry V and so many others, left a complex record of their days and achievements. But for many others, all that most of us see of these people are their tombs.
One of the most powerful—the resting place of Lady Elizabeth Nightingale—features a swooning Lady Elizabeth being protected by her husband, as death climbs out of a tomb and prepares to stab her with a sword. It’s as if her husband is trying to protect her from death even after the fact.
These were important people who went to great lengths to preserve their legacies. And yet their stories are already largely gone.
We fear death because, in some ways, we fear the perfect anonymity that comes to most of us. We fear being forgotten. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Which makes the 21st century, and all the technological glories we have now, so intriguing, even when it comes to the subject of death. After all, these earthly vessels we inhabit are finite—fixed with an expiration date. But the Internet, not so much. As we often remind you here, the pictures we post and the Twitter missives we send live forever.
In an article for dailydot.com, Zan McQuade discusses the strange, online immortality that people find now. A friend of hers died in an automobile accident, and her still-existent Facebook page became a memorial to her memory. McQuade talks about how there are a growing number of services that allow you to posthumously manage your online footprint: Want your LinkedIn page to vanish after your passing? It can be done. Want your Twitter feed to tweet for eternity? That can be done too. She and her husband even talked about what they wanted to do with their digital outreaches should they pass on—as if they were discussing organ donations or their respective wills. She writes:
I’m starting to wonder … if it’s even possible for there to be nothing left of us when we die. For example, I’m still Facebook friends with multiple ghosts. Once in a while, underneath the caption “People You Might Know,” Facebook will rotate in a picture of a woman from my town who passed away a few years ago. She is no longer with us, but her smiling profile picture is still there, cycling in and out amongst images of my living friends. Yes, I do know her. But she’s no longer around to accept my friend request.
Perhaps some may find all this a little morbid. But for me, these digital reminders are comforting. We have more than gravemarkers to remember our loved ones by now, more even than memory. We have their own words etched on the Internet ether, their pictures smiling back at us from our computer screens. We can be reminded of them more often—and reminded that, hopefully, they’re still charming the socks off folks in heaven.
But then again, there’s something perhaps a little eerie about these online reminders too. They are, in a way ghosts: The people have moved on, but their digital selves are stuck—a reminder of who they were, not who they are. As set in stone as any tomb.
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