A Modern Death

The film Harold and Maude, 1971.

The other night I decided to watch one of my favorite films, Harold and Maude about an eccentric young man who falls in love with an eccentric and much, much older woman. The two meet in the 1971 film over their shared appreciation or hobby for attending the funerals of strangers. It might sound morbid, but this is a tender and comedic take on a coming of age story. I have loved this dark comedy film since I saw it as a child in the 1980s and I had a bit of a crush on the slim Bud Cort with his dark hair and blue eyes. The movie, directed by Hal Ashby who also made one of my other favorite films Being There, was a critical and commercial flop when it was released, but over the decades it found its audience and became a cult classic.

The film was on my mind due to the recent sudden death of a cousin. Their death, was the second sudden death of a cousin this year. Both were too young to have died and both died alone at home only to be discovered later. The coincidental circumstances seemed odd to me being so close together. Perhaps it says something greater about the loneliness and isolation of modern life in the United States stitched together by cell phones and social media. Or maybe it simply says something about those individuals.

Additionally I was bothered at how the information of the deaths spread through the family. In both cases I was notified by text message, one from a family member and the other from an elementary school classmate who was friends with my cousin and to which I was very grateful. In the second case, I would have likely not known about my cousin's death until much later or at all. It is possible as there have been other family deaths over the years that I never knew about until many years later. These were people I was close with as a child, had meant something to me and it would have been respectful to have said goodbye at their funeral.

Is it so hard to pick up the phone and text or better yet call someone to tell them that a family member has died? Have we lost even that little bit of decency and courtesy?

How deaths are announced now are on social media like a press release written to whom it may concern and especially on Facebook sandwiched between the silly cat videos, fattening recipes, political gripes and photos of restaurant meals. There are several problems with this way of announcing a person's death.

It is unseemly for a person to log onto to Facebook, if one does that at all, and scroll through the newsfeed of ads and discover that your cousin or anyone you know has died like it was a status update of having gone for a walk in the woods.

 

Another is that not everyone has Facebook or there are people like me who go months or years without logging into it. I loathe Facebook despite having an account because of how the service operates and how people use it. One significant problem with announcing a death on Facebook is that there is no guarantee that the algorithms will allow it to be seen and not buried in the crap of ads, pages and groups that I do not follow or all the stupid recipe posts from people who seem to think posting hundreds of times a day on Facebook is a real job. You cannot assume that just because you posted something on the service that people will actually see it.

At the conclusion of one's life do they not deserve better than to become a status update on Facebook? What does it say about them and what does it say about us that this is thought to be acceptable manners?

I am as frustrated as Harold was with his mother and society in the early 1970s. I do not live on a remote island without a phone or lack an outside connection to the world that makes me unreachable. I have all of the same means of communication available to me and more than when people seemed to pass on family news quite easily and quickly before the invention of Facebook. It is no wonder people are dying alone in isolation because people are losing touch with their humanity due to the coldness of technology. Human connections have been replaced with technological ones and people will not realize it until it is too late as they clutch their cell phones, stare into the abyss and keep feeding the machines and algorithms absolutely and mind-numbingly meaningless data.

Harold and Maude, 1971.

In order for me to find out about my cousin's death via Facebook, I had to track it down through specifically searching for it. I only found out about the funeral plans two days in advance through third hand information from someone I am not even friends with and that is pathetic. The funeral stood a better chance of Harold and Maude randomly attending than it did for me. I cannot attend due to the scheduling and I will find my own way of saying goodbye like Harold driving his car over the cliff and walking away playing the banjo.