Life and Death On the Matrix

My XBox Live Avatar

I usually try not to write about heavy or depressing subject matter.  I mean, hell, that’s no way to get people to want to keep reading, is it?  Still, this post has been sitting on my brain, squeezing it, for days now, begging to be written.

Last summer, I stumbled upon an excellent piece by Marian Schembari called “Facebook Has Changed the Way We Grieve.”  As she says in her excellent piece, “There is no good way to blog about the death of a friend.”  I had no idea how true those words could be and how much technology had changed the way we grieve until now.

Back in early October, I received a phone call at work from the mother of a friend and former co-worker.  She was calling to tell me that her son had died suddenly and unexpectedly a few days prior.  I had known her son for a few years, since I met him when he interviewed for a job with me.  We weren’t extremely close.  We went to the movies in a large group now and then.  The last time I saw him was at my 40th birthday party back in April.

Now, I’m no stranger to the death of friends and loved ones.  My brother died unexpectedly (while I was out of state on a long automobile trip) back in 1998 and it hit me like a freight train.  The problem is, even though I’m a very social person who loves to meet and talk to new people, I’m also a very internal person.  My passions and emotions run strong and hot (Is this a bad time for a “That’s what she said?”).  I’ve always had a hard time with grief.  I do think that comes with the whole “geek” territory.  I have trouble coming to terms with those emotions because if I let them, they can be overwhelming.  The difference between 1998, when my brother died, and 2010 is that in those 12 years, we have become a more electronically connected tribe.

We are all plugged into the Matrix.

The Wachowski brothers had the right idea back in 1999.  In 2010, we are all plugged into the Matrix.  When my brother died, there was no Facebook.  There was no Twitter.  There was no XBox Live or Playstation Network.  We didn’t, or at least most of us didn’t, communicate by text.  ”Snail mail” was still more prevalent than email.  When we wanted to pass news about momentous events like the death of a loved one, we got on the phone and called people.  The tragedy phone tree was painful and slow at times.  It still is.

Kris

When I received that phone call back in early October, my friend had been dead for several days.  The act of going through her son’s cell phone was delayed, and rightfully so, by her grief at the unexpected loss of her beloved son.  The first hints that something was amiss came from Facebook.

When I received the phone call, I was caught totally off guard.  I had been out of the loop… off the matrix, for several days.  When I started calling other friends to let them know what had happened, I was surprised to learn that most of them knew.  Some of them, just like Marian in the link above, thought that it was some sick joke.  All of them had learned of our friend’s death from Facebook.  Having been unplugged for a few days due to some hectic work schedules, I was not in the know.  I was uninformed until I received the phone call.  Another of our friends who is currently on an overseas military deployment was similarly blindsided by my subsequent message.

That was when it hit me.

We are so plugged into the matrix that we take it for granted when someone else is not.

My friends all know that I generally keep up with Facebook and Twitter and all the social media, so they just assumed I knew.  Having been unplugged for a few days, I assumed that everyone was as in the dark about it as I was.  I was quickly directed to our friend’s Facebook page, where the litany of condolences, messages to the beyond, regrets of missed opportunities, expressions of support and the like were already piling up.

Did I regret not knowing about it sooner?  Yes, of course I did.  What it have changed anything?  No, of course not.

I’ll admit that Kris and I were not the closest of friends.  It was one of those friendships where we always meant to get together and hang out, but our primary means of connecting was through work and, to be perfectly honest, we didn’t share a ton of common interests.  When he moved out of state a few months before his death, we lost touch other than through reading each other’s updates on Facebook.  When he came to town the weekend before his death, we missed each other because of my work schedule.  I’m glad we had the opportunity to hang out at my birthday party in April, but other than that, work, and the occasional movie, our friendship was virtual.

Virtual Friends

Virtual friends seems like a pitiful way to describe a relationship, but the truth is, I have a lot of virtual friends and precious few friends that are more than that.  What I mean is: Most of my friendships have the majority of their interactions carried out via the internet and occasionally text messaging.  I tweet with my friends.  They tweet with me.  We’re birds calling out across the miles.  We read each other’s status updates and share our life events, both major and trivial, in a little more than a hundred characters at a time.  We get the ticker tape version of each other’s lives.  We scroll in and out of each other’s lives in a constant stream of information; tweets and texts and status updates, photos and links, blog posts and gaming achievements.  It seems sad and in many ways it is.  It reeks of a way of life gone the way of landlines and curbside mailboxes.  Many of us still have those things, but they’re a no man’s land of telemarketing, junk mail and bill collectors.  Even our email inboxes are passe, filled with spam and slower than the instant news feed of social media.

Man With A Mission

Aleks

Last week, I received another phone call at work.  It was the mother of another friend.  Her son had died, also unexpectedly, a few days prior.  Grief had once again delayed the news.

This time, the friend is someone I met as a customer at work.  He was one of our friendliest and most loyal customers.  He came in a few days a week and after I got my dog, he was always eager to hear my stories of our misadventures.  Eventually, we shared gamer tags and added each other on XBox Live.  When he found out that I liked to write and was into social media, he gave me a mission.  He told me that I needed to start a community online where local gamers in the Myrtle Beach area (whether they were video gamers, tabletop role-playing gamers, board gamers, or whatever) could gather and set up times to meet either in person, online, or on XBox Live or the Playstation Network.  This was around the time Jason, now a staff writer for Geekcentricity, was trying to convince me to start a blog again.  A few weeks later, Geekcentricity was born.  My friend Aleks, who died last week, was the first person to receive a Geekcentricity business card when I had them made.

Geekcentricity is not really the place that Aleks wanted me to create.  It is a step in the right direction.  It has also allowed me to connect with a number of local geeks and gamers  Neither of us knew how many of us are out there, and that is the point of his request.  I will be launching something in the near future that will honor his request.  You’ll be able to read about it here on Geekcentricity first.

I didn’t realize until his mom called me after his death how much Aleks and my brother had in common.  They both suffered from the same disorder.  They both died suddenly of heart failure at age 36, separated by 12 years, give or take a few months.

The Live Dead

I’m not talking about zombies here.  I’m talking about one of the social networks that I share with my real virtual friends, XBox Live.  Both of these friends were on my XBox Live friends list.  XBox Live was the primary playground where we gathered.  For Kris and I, it was our work with video games that brought us together, so it was only natural that a video game network was the place where we gathered to hang out.  Most of our friendship was centered around either the selling of video games, or the playing of them.  The pinnacle of our virtual friendship was during the heyday of a Call of Duty: World at War phase that all of us went through.  We gathered almost nightly in game lobbies and matches to hunt each other down and shoot each other with WWII vintage virtual weaponry.  We leveled up in public matches and then opened private lobbies from which we staged massive battles with a total of about 16 friends into the wee hours of the morning.  It was the video game geek equivalent of going to a bar to hang out after work.  At some point, those matches stopped and we all drifted apart.  I miss those nights.  We haven’t been able to replicate it since then.  Isn’t that always the way of things?

Aleks and I didn’t get to play online as often as either of us would have liked.  Our respective schedules never seemed to match up.  We still enjoyed messaging and chatting with each other about what we were playing and we still saw each other when he came into the store, and our virtual friendship carried on.

Avatars

There is one consequence of these deaths that I didn’t foresee.  It struck me the other night, right in the face.  It was a shovel to the forehead.  XBox Live has this thing with players’ avatars.  When a player is offline, the avatar appears to be sleeping.

You already know where I’m going with this.

I logged on the other night to play some Call of Duty: Black Ops and, as usual, scrolled through my friends list to see who else was online and what they were playing.  As I reached the end of the happy game-playing avatars of my friends, I came to the part of the list where the sleeping avatars of my currently offline friends reside. Aleks was the first sleeping avatar on the list, with Kris just a few avatars to his left.  That’s when the shovel connected with my septum and drove it into my brain meats.  These avatars weren’t going to wake up.  Virtual had just become real.  I turned off my console and called it a night.

Where Was I Going With This?

I’m not sure.

I know I didn’t write it for sympathy.

I think I just wanted to craft a monument.  I wanted to mark the passing of two friends that I’m thankful to have known, but that I also could’ve gotten to know better.

I also wanted to welcome you to the new virtual grieving process.

How about you?  Is there anybody else out there who has lost friends on the matrix?  Has social media changed the process (or processing) of grief?  Do you have any virtual friends that you wish you could get to know better?

I’m not sure if this new virtual grief is better or worse, I just know it’s different.  Welcome to the matrix.  Now if I could only figure out that whole bullet time thing.