My Patient Readers

Dear Patient Readers:

For over three years, I have been using Blogger to communicate with you and for me the process of posting Cry Laugh Heal to the internet was working out nicely.

 

From the beginning, my goal was to try and help others who lost loved ones and were searching for resources that could help them find a way to carry on without their precious person.  At Cry Laugh Heal, I  write about my experiences with loss and resilience but always with others in mind.  I draw strength from the stories of other people and I'm sure you do too.  It's about support.  No one should ever feel alone and without hope.

 

So when I recently discovered that my blog was difficult to find from a teckie-internet-google-search engine kind of way, I was told I needed to change to another software and thus also change the look of Cry Laugh Heal. 

 

It has been one big frustration after another and I am writing to apologize for the inconvenience of technological problems on my blog site.  If you have recently logged on to www.crylaughheal.com, you discovered for yourself that the site is changing.  I didn't know that you would be able to see the ever changing look of Cry Laugh Heal but there it is.

It has been very difficult for me to navigate this process and find someone to help me transfer more than three years of blog posts and pictures from Blogger to Word Press and then take the Word Press content and work it into a new template but I finally found a great tech guy.  Unfortunately, it's taking longer than I thought.

I miss my writing routine and communicating with all of you on a regular basis but I am also excited for the new Cry Laugh Heal site to be born.  In the meantime, I am tweeting at @crylaughheal and I have a Facebook page that can be found at https://www.facebook.com/crylaughheal?ref=hl.  You are welcome to join me there and I hope you do!!

Here's to a new and improved Cry Laugh Heal that I hope will see the light of day very soon and give you the helping hand you may be looking for as you work through your loss and embrace your new journey.

Peace.

Mary Kate

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.


 

Jesus Tweets

There is definitely an art to tweeting.  The ability to say something precise and succinct in 140 characters or less is not an easy thing to master.  I still have a lot to learn about tweeting but I have to say that I do enjoy it!  I don't find tweeting to be shallow or a waste of time.  I think it's a matter of letting extraneous words fall by the wayside and getting right to your point.

Thousand of tweets ago, when my son helped me open my account, I first stared at the computer screen and thought, "What should I say?"  But you can't think about it too much.  You just have to do it.  Some funny, silly and informational tweets just roll off my fingers but others are a bit more of an effort because of what I want to say about something more important such as health, nutrition, grieving or healing.

I think people take to Twitter and find it so appealing because it lends itself to almost any subject.  Anyone can tweet and I think most people do.  Although until yesterday when I read a short Vanity Fair item on tweeting, I never thought about Jesus tweeting. 

 

But the idea of Jesus tweeting just strikes me as hilarious.

 

Picturing Jesus  hanging out in his robes with his Smartphone, intently looking at the screen while his thumbs are flying across the keypad is something that lends itself to a lot of humorous possibilities.  Think about it.  The internet is a global platform!  Would Jesus re-tweet anything that the Apostles or Mary Magdalene might put out there?

 

WWJT?

Who knows?  After all, as Jesus would say, "Goodness comes from within."  OMG, that's only 17 characters!  It's so tight yet there's room for much more to say! 

 

Don't forget about hashtags too!

You know Jesus would be great at that too!  What would he pick as a hashtag to "Goodness comes from within"?   Let's see. . . #Pure? #Christian? No, I think he would go with #MyMotherSaysSo!

Vanity Fair
August 16, 2013

What Would Jesus Tweet? A World-Civ Guide to the Succinct

By Bruce Handy

Twitter doesn’t really need defending. Like any medium of communication—e-mail, blogs, newspapers, books, talking, yelling—it’s as good or bad as the people using it and the ideas being expressed. But that said, I find it irritating that the 140-character limit has become easy shorthand for the alleged shallowness of contemporary culture, a digital analog (haha) to Andy Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame. Or, as PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel recently put it: “We need to think about the future for more than just 140 characters or 15 minutes at a time if we want to make real long-term progress.” In a similar vein, a friend and respected colleague of mine recently declared that seeking wisdom and insight on Twitter is a fool’s errand; that she wrote this on Twitter itself speaks to a growing school of self-loathing Tweeters, at least on my feed.

Contra Thiel, some thinkers might actually be better off sticking to 140 characters—right off the bat, Peggy Noonan, Leon Weiseltier, and Naomi Wolf come to mind—while my friend’s tweet made me curious about just how much insight and wisdom you can cram into 140 characters. Turns out, it worked great for Jesus, Descartes, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Martin Luther King Jr., Fran Lebowitz, and Donald Rumsfeld.

 

A 140-character digest of Western culture:

 

I think, therefore I am. (24)

It’s funny because it’s true. (29)

I am large; I contain multitudes. (33)

Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (35)

Eighty percent of success is showing up. (40)

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. (47)

The vice-presidency isn’t worth a pitcher of warm piss. (55)

Parting is all we know of heaven, and all we need of hell. (58)

It’s not the size of the ship; it’s the motion of the ocean. (60)

Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. (68)

Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. (73)

The opposite of talking isn’t listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. (76)

Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. (79)

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (83)

I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (113)

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. (112)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (117)

There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. (124)

There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. (123)

You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time. (130)
 

Your Digital Legacy

Every day, several times a day, you electronically email or text someone, update your Facebook status, Tweet, take a picture on your phone or record a moment from your life which you want to save and remember.

 

Just as the internet opened up a whole new world of information sharing in a way no one could have ever foreseen, these electronic tools such as iPhones, computers and other gadgets strive to further break down the walls of communication and help us share everything in a way that wasn't possible even five years ago.

 

But with these communication opportunities comes a responsibility to filter what you put out there and take care that this information doesn't land in the wrong hands and used improperly.  In other words, whatever it is that you said and did, are you sure that it will only be received by the person you sent it to?  And no one else?  What happens to all this electronic stuff after we are gone?

I was thinking about these questions because the husband of a friend of mine died suddenly just about a year ago and his widow is still processing on many levels what happened.  She recently was going through his home office and found his laptop.  Her husband was a writer and she was curious to read what was stored in the his computer.

Did she know the passwords to his computer?  No, she didn't.  Could she take it to a computer store and get them to unlock it?  Yes, she could.  But did she really want to go through his computer files and emails now that he died?  She knew that whatever it is that she would find on his computer, he wasn't here to explain it's meaning or intent to her.

To me, this is the proverbial Pandora's box.

The whole idea of a digital legacy is becoming a very common issue and it's something people need to figure out.

Companies have been started to help people open and transfer a loved one's data.  A number of books have been published addressing these personal and legal issues.  What will happen to all of your computer transactions should something happen to you?  Does anyone know your computer passwords?  Do you even want anyone to know your computer passwords?  How do you feel about all this?

In the case of my friend, she did decide to take her husband's Mac to an Apple store and there is a process that you go through in terms of showing proof about the situation.  Eventually, Apple did unlock her husband's computer.

So far, she hasn't opened anything up and looked or read anything.  She says that she keeps the laptop opened up on the table next to her home computer so that when she is working on her computer she feels he is right there with her.

If you want to read more about the various issues surrounding a digital legacy, this link will take you to an excellent USA Today story:

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/technology/story/2012-05-07/digital-mourning/55268806/1