Over the past few weeks, the mother of a friend of mine has been dying. I am in no way a friend of the family, so I knew nothing about her illness beyond what my friend told me, and, as I wasn’t a friend of the family, and we are both reserved to the point of being French about eschewing personal disclosures that might seem offhand, he did not tell me very much. When he mentioned hospice care, and the need to keep his mother comfortable, I knew that death was at hand, but it was not in the nature of our friendship for me to expect a trumpeted announcement that it had arrived. I felt sad for my friend for all the usual reasons but also for a few quirky ones. (His mother was my father’s age when he died, twenty-six years ago; from which another special reason might be deduced: she was twice as close to me in age as he is. My friend is only a few years older than my daughter, and I worry a lot about dying before my grandson, who pretty clearly loves me as deeply as a child his age can, is old enough to remember me.) The illness had come on suddenly, one of those factors that is a blessing or a curse depending on your perspective at the moment. I hoped, as I think we all do, that when it came to my friend’s telling me that his mother had died, I wouldn’t say anything fatuous or otherwise unwelcome.

Being me, however, I would certainly want to say something, and that is how Facebook presented a problem. My friend mentioned the hospice care to me, as I’m sure he did to other friends, but he said nothing about it at Facebook. He said very little at Facebook, counting, I believe, on his friends’ intelligence and empathy to infer the absolutely necessary information, which he had also stated, in one sentence (saying that his mother was very ill), on his Web log. I want to make two points here. The first is that my friend’s Facebook page was, laudably, a place of implication, at which friendship was honored by the absence of bogus intimacy (chitchat, gossip, and drama). I find that I cannot get round the word “noble” when thinking of it. The other day, for example, he posted an album of photographs that he has taken while attending to his parents out of town. He is a talented photographer, and his pictures were, under the circumstances, eloquent without being garrulous. It was done, if I may say so, as Elizabeth Bennet would have done it, not as Mrs Bennet would have done.

The other point is that I tied myself to the mast when reading the comments of Facebook friends who were friends of the family. One friend commented on the photo album by saying that she was so sorry to hear what her own mother had just told her. (Ah, so it has happened, I said to myself. Then I said to myself, told her what?) Another friend appears to have committed the faux pas that I was determined to avoid, regretting my friend’s loss before it actually occurred. Once upon a time, that’s exactly what I’d have done; I’d have been unable to resist the occasion for expressing my condolences, because, frankly, I couldn’t help displaying the possession of knowledge. I don’t care for the cruder forms of power, but I have a passion for the latest information. I don’t so much want to know things before other people do as I want to know them at the very first instant when I might reasonably be expected to know them. Every now and then, this leads me to bank on an inference, and in the past my banking has been more than occasionally imprudent. Now that my natural impetuousness is fading with age, I’m better equipped to resist such temptations.

This morning, the announcement came, at Facebook; my friend’s friends were linked to a handsome Web site that included an obituary published in the local city newspaper. My relief at not having made a fool of myself was, under the circumstances, arguably unseemly, but nobody saw it and I mention it now for the edification of others: since I believe that we ought to risk a little more than we do making fools of ourselves, I have to prize the moments when foolishness is averted, because it is not as a matter of policy. (Let no one imagine that tying yourself to the mast as Odysseus did is a policy.) My friend wrote to me, briefly, and in his email he mentioned a piece of music that he has been listening to. It was something that I knew only a famous excerpt of, but whether from freakishness or synchronicity, a CD of the work sat atop a very small pile of dics within reach of my workspace. So I listened to it, all of it, and I allowed myself the largely but not wholly ignorant speculation that my friend’s mother would have smiled to know that I finally did. 

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 at 11:30 pm.