Internet Loss

Have our electronic devices separated us from each other so much that it's now normal to text people about a loved one's death?

Has it become routine to attend the funeral of a friend or a loved one and start snapping selfies?

Why would someone let their cellphone ring during a funeral service and then answer it and continue talking?

We are in a strange state of communications today.




The first time I saw a selfie taken at a funeral I have to say I was really shocked.

 

I didn't know the young girl in the picture but she tweeted a picture of herself and a couple of her friends at a funeral and it looked to me like they were more at a party than at a funeral service to pay their respects to the family of the deceased.  Her selfie felt sad to me.

Call me old fashioned but I think taking pictures at a funeral is way over the line.

 

But I also realize dear readers that not everyone feels the way I do.  Please share your thoughts on these situations if you would like for I'd love to hear what you have to say.

The anonymity and global reach of the internet has helped people open up to exercising a new kind of dialogue about grief and loss but that dialogue is not without its' extremes.  I must include myself in this online grieving movement because I have been blogging and writing Cry Laugh Heal for almost four years because I wanted to help others and add to the ongoing dialogue and I also visit many other sites where people freely discuss many private aspects of experiencing a loss.

I have found most internet sites to be very helpful in making me feel less alone in my feelings but I only discovered them by accident through my own research.  My support group didn't suggest any web sites and when my husband died ten years ago it would never have occurred to me to go to my computer for comfort. 

At that point, my life and the life of our young son was turned upside down and inside out and I never thought about going online to find a grief chat group or even to begin blogging about my thoughts concerning loss or developing resilience.  I'm sure at that time there were people who were blogging about grief and loss but I just didn't know about them and didn't have the energy for trying to find them.

I was totally consumed with just trying to keep it together.  I went back to working full time after taking about ten days off to arrange the funeral and burial of my husband and our son couldn't wait to bury himself in schoolwork so that he could forget about his father's death.  

 

Today online discussions about grief seem to everywhere with scores of websites and blogs focusing on many different kinds of losses: the death of a spouse, a child, a friend, a partner, a parent or even a pet.  I think this is a great development; a healthy and wonderful thing because for decades people never discussed the emotional effects of their abrupt losses, the shock or trauma they felt seeing their loved one die or what they did to help them get whole again after their loss.

However, our electronics can sometimes serve to disconnect us and a very sad event this week in the news brought this to mind.  As friendly and open as the internet can be to unfettered dialogue about loss, it can also be cold in its execution. 

I still find it hard to believe that Malaysian Airlines chose to text the relatives of the 153 passengers aboard Flight 370 to tell them that no one on board survived the plane's mysterious disappearance.  What happened to exercising some human contact and compassion?  The airlines should have had a room setup with grief counselors and put someone in charge of personally giving them such tragic news.

While it did not look as though anyone had survived the strange crash, no one gives up hope until there is evidence to do otherwise.  Texting the information was cruel.

Cellphones ringing in church?  This has happened a few times at my parish during Mass and it never ceases to surprise me that people act casual while the phone is ringing and they don't seem to be in a rush to turn off their phones.  Instead, people let their phones (no matter what the ringtone) continue to ring during Mass or a funeral service.  It's plain rude.  What about when people answer the phone during a funeral service and continue to make conversation?  "Hey! How are you? Yeah I'm at a funeral right now.  Um, I think I'm okay.  How about I call you later?"  Turn it off before you get into the service.  Put it on silence.  Please.  It's not that hard.

Our actions with electronic devices and our behavior on the internet only requires some thought about how our decisions will affect others.

Let's be careful out there.


 

Can You Hear Me Now?

It's one thing to forget to turn your cell phone off and then have it ring while you are in church, in a job interview, at a funeral or in a theater, but it takes some major manipulation of a person's ego to actually answer it while they are in those places.

 

Right?

 

Someone I didn't know sat next to me during a play and her cell phone started ringing.  I immediately looked at her and she started searching her purse to find the phone.  I assumed that once she found it, she would just turn it off.  Wrong!! She actually answered it and started whispering that she couldn't talk because she was at a theater performance.

 

Say what??!!

 

 

Forgetting to turn off my cell phone has only happened to me once and the embarrassment was enough so that I always check to make sure my phone is off when it should be.  I was in a large meeting some years ago with an executive of the company I worked for at that time and my cellphone started ringing.  I truly had forgotten to turn it to silent. I quickly put my hand in my purse and turned it off.  Luckily I caught it after the first ring!

 

But yesterday I read a story that tops everything.  Caleb Wilde, a young funeral director, posted on his blog, Confessions of a Funeral Director (www.calebwilde.com), that a colleague who is also a funeral director told him about a funeral service where the pastor's cell phone unbelievably began to ring in the church while the pastor was addressing those gathered to pay their respects.  I don't even want to think about the possible songs this pastor might have used as a ringtone. 

 

As if the ringing wasn't bad enough, the pastor then actually answered his cell phone while the service stopped and he then went on to confirm a time for a golf appointment in front of the whole congregation. Then he went on with the funeral service as though his actions on the cell phone were perfectly normal and within the bounds of good etiquette.

 

Not!!

 

How hard is it to turn off a cellphone or put the cell phone on vibrate during a funeral or anywhere else where you should not be talking?  I'm sure that the pastor probably received a few well chosen words from the family of the deceased after that church service. 

Has anything similar happened to you?  I would be interested in hearing about your experiences with cell phones ringing in places that surprised you.

Texting, Texting, Texting

You can file today's post under the category of silly -- but true!

It's a slice of life that may be about to arrive in a community near you.

Seeing. Eye. People. 

That's right.  Seeing Eye People.

A Seeing Eye Person In Action

As in: hold on to me (a person, not a dog) and I will guide you and be your eyes while you continue to walk and text.

 

The idea of offering Seeing Eye People as a service is performed by Improv Everywhere & BuzzFeed as a bit of street comedy but it not that far fetched. 

Every day in DC, there is either someone texting and walking right into me or others or there is someone on a crowded sidewalk walking slowly and texting at the same time, gridlocking the pedestrian traffic.  Incidents of people texting and walking out into traffic and getting hit by cars, tripping and bumping in buildings and people has also skyrocketed across the U.S. 

 

My son just told me about this concept and I had to Google it right away to see what this whole thing was all about.  Watch it for yourself and see.  Please notice that the people who are walking and texting continue to text and walk  as though this is perfectly normal.  It's the reaction of other people watching that's so funny! 

 

Cheers!

 

 

Clothes To You

With the today's launch of Cry, Laugh, Heal, I’ll start by sharing an unexpected moment that helped me cope with my husband’s death.

Grieving can take you down some unpredictable paths -- sometimes revealing humor where you least expect it.

I learned the importance of having a sense of humor early in life while growing up in a large Irish Catholic family.  If you couldn’t laugh at yourself, then someone else would imitate you until you did.  So laughing and making jokes about life’s bumps in the road was part of my DNA, an integral part of my spirit, and it served me well until my husband died.

Suddenly, I found myself in this new role of being a middle-aged widow and single mother and I felt as though I was outside of myself performing some sort of high-wire act.  On the one hand I was trying to move forward and support my young son, while on the other hand I was completely numb.  As much as my family and friends supported me, I felt as if no one really got my “spin cycle” of emotions and what I was trying to handle. 

I decided I needed to find others who had also lost loved ones and talk to them about how they managed to put the pieces back together and go on with their lives.  I started going to group support sessions at Sibley Hospital’s bereavement group called Widowed Persons Outreach (WPO) and it was there that I found the emotional resources and freedom to talk about ALL the issues surrounding my husband’s death -- even the things that sound really irreverent and crazy to other people.

Talking about the emptiness, the surreal feelings, the memories and the loss of future memories was exhausting but therapeutic.  But the best thing that came out of these emotional dialogues was that I unexpectedly rediscovered my sense of humor. 

We were talking about what happens when you have buried your loved one yet their belongings – their clothes, their food, their books, most of what they owned – is still all around you.  I jumped into the discussion and began talking about what happened to me one day when I was in the house all by myself.  That particular day, I really felt like I was falling apart and all I wanted was some kind of contact with my husband.

 I opened my cell phone, walked around the room and stared at it, thinking there actually was the possibility that something might happen -- a ring, a text, a signal of some sort from my husband.  I know it sounds strange but when you are in the throes of deep grief and your loss is so raw, you are just hurting and not being logical. 

I closed my eyes and imagined that he was hugging me.  Then I opened the hall closet and took one of his tweed jackets off the hanger.  I put it on and of course I immediately felt better. I smelled him in that precious jacket and I imagined his arms around me.  I was comforted and torn up at the same time.

As I talked about this experience to my group, I talked directly to the husky man sitting across from me and said, “Trying on his clothes really made me feel a lot better.  Haven’t you ever done the same thing?”

Without missing a beat, he said with a completely straight face, “I gotta tell you.   I have never, ever once thought about wearing my wife’s clothes.  Wearing her pink cardigan would not make me feel better!”

I totally burst out laughing.  Something about the serious expression on his face, his delivery and the mental picture of this big guy in a small pastel sweater made me laugh so hard I couldn’t get my breath.  And everyone else started laughing too so I knew that we had hit on something close to people’s hearts.

It was then that I knew life was going to be a little softer.  Nothing was going to be great or wonderful; just slightly more bearable.  For a long time, I didn’t think it was okay to laugh.  I wasn’t supposed to be enjoying myself and besides, nothing was funny to me anyway.

There is a very thin line between crying and laughing.  Many times you find yourself doing one of them and all of a sudden you are doing the other.  But a good cry or a good laugh can make you feel as if a huge weight has been lifted and that’s what this blog is here to do.