CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO

DEATH IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL PROLIFERATION, AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

PUBLIC MOURNING: A KIND OF FAST

We are taught to respond with mannerly emotion to the inevitably dead—that is, to everyone else’s dead, to the dead whom Ernest Hemingway attempted (in the most uncharacteristic of his short stories, “A Natural History of the Dead”) to dignify by startling, or disgusting, us out of our misapprehensive complacency, the assimilation that permits us to see “them” (Katrina victims, World Trade Center first-responders, U.S. military casualties, etc.) not as graphically destroyed but heroically fallen. It is a seemly denial of the flesh, like a religious fast. It’s hard to say whether Hemingway was more aware of the true conditions under which dead heroes meet their ends or of our own essential ghoulishness: These are the same dead we furtively revel in—the dead of the 3 a.m. websites, the secret autopsy reports and police photos, the dead reduced to recovered scraps of DNA, sumptuously interred femurs. These are the public deaths whose smell and feel we seek out privately, to plunge beyond the decorous piety of the news story, to move beyond the taunting simulacra of the movies into wide-open unknowns of anger, velocity, impact, decay. Public mourning says, I am sad. Now show me the film.

TRAINING WHEELS

With public mourning, the act to which we are called is the opposite of the grotesque social inappropriateness of true grief (see: keening, rending of flesh, hurling oneself into open coffins to embrace the dead, hurling oneself into open graves, the fulfilled suicide pact, discerning of supernal visitations and signs, etc.). When I was a kid I had a friend who thought that dealing with grief was a little like moving from the bunny hill to the black diamond on the ski slopes. You started gradually, with a nice, inconsequential death (we do not, as a society, really believe Donne’s business about how together we comprise a continent unavoidably diminished by each individual demise), and then moved to the big ones, presumably at last to greet your own death with utter insouciance.

The idea of building up tolerance for grief, for death itself, has its weird appeal. What it overlooks is that there are the deaths that tip you over and those that are no trouble at all. There’s a middle ground someplace, I know that: there are the deaths that arouse your hidden fears; there are the deaths that urge forth springlike effulgences of nostalgia; there are the deaths that elicit an unsettled emotional response strangely similar to what I’ve experienced when the Mets have lost in the playoffs. But—to paraphrase Philip Roth—there are some presences whose absence can undo even the strongest people.

I am a middle-class American, so I’ve managed to remain fairly sheltered from death (despite the invitation to psychological trauma issued jointly some years ago by Al-Qaeda and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene), and in fact the first death I remember that really startled me was the direct result of class inequality. It was a girl, Juanita, who was in my second-grade class at P.S. 41 and lived at the Broadway Central Hotel, a notorious welfare pit that eventually collapsed but not before claiming her life: She’d fallen down an elevator shaft when the doors had opened onto nothing. Lurking somewhere in there is a rueful joke about poverty; one with a punch line that has the landlord saying, “Nu? An elevator too you were expecting at these prices?” My handling of her death was consistent with the macabre norms of American boyhood. In a time before grief counseling was routinely made available to “survivors,” my friends and I spent the day speculating luridly on the condition of her body. When I got home from school, I took one of the Magic Markers I was supposed to be drawing smiling suns and rigidly vertical stalks of grass with and drew instead an X over her image in the class picture, then crossed her out on the accompanying list of names, writing an explanation within parentheses—“dead.”

Then came my grandfather. My mother has always possessed the gift of undaunted candor, a gift bestowed upon her that she, in turn, has liberally bestowed upon all. She always took it upon herself to disabuse me of my illusions—those I might have, for example, concerning any resemblance the movies might bear to real life. So when my grandfather died after losing what an obituary might have described as “a long battle with cancer,” while I was away at summer camp, there wasn’t any telephone call summoning me from the cacophony of the mess hall or the fellowship of the dingy bunk. There was a matter-of-fact letter, typewritten, composed in my mother’s matter-of-fact style.

As if she had planned it thus, there also wasn’t a moment when I walked down to the deserted lakeshore “to be alone” no episode in which I stared at the millions of stars visible in the clear night sky upstate and wondered where in the universe my grandfather had gone. As it happened, when the letter arrived, I was laid up in the camp infirmary, aflame with the impetigo that my having been left to my own hygienic devices for over a month had incubated. Every morning a large middle-aged nurse would supervise me as I stripped naked, stepped into a scalding bath, and then scrubbed the crusty scabs off each of the festering pustules using a brush saturated with pHisoHex. It was painful on several levels. The nurse was not attractive. No one visited me. Quarantined without any other reading material, I read the same MAD magazine paperback reprint (Good ’n’ Mad) over and over. And of course my mother’s letter. In these circumstances, I attempted to experience grief for the first time:

I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, which I hate to have to tell you. Grandpa died last Saturday, and was buried yesterday, Tuesday. It was a very peaceful and a painless death. He really just slipped away, first into a coma, and then very quietly into death. I wish I could have given you the news face to face. If you want to we’ll talk about it when you come home. Of course we were all expecting it, and the whole family has reacted very calmly. Grandma will be leaving on Saturday for a trip to Puerto Rico where she can relax and visit with the family.

By my reckoning, Grandpa had been dying practically forever (a variation, I guess, on that idea of building-up-to-it), and the interdiction that took hold, embodied right there in the letter, was that we were all to be relieved that he’d died; to be reassured that it was easier for him to be dead than it was for him to go on living. This myth of the blessed death raises questions, the biggest being: who and what, exactly, are relieved? Few would argue that leukemia and multiple myeloma are easy, but there is a clear distinction between relief and nonbeing (we are suspicious of precise meanings precisely because of such distinctions). The daily responsibility for dealing with my grandfather’s decline was one that my grandmother accepted stoutly (although she enjoyed reminding people of it), and so fully that, having retired in her early sixties after working for decades as a Spanish-language interpreter for the state of New York, she had begun a second career working as a nurse’s aide at Montefiore Hospital, encouraged to apply for the job by the staffers to whom her daily visits had made her a familiar presence. But while my grandfather’s illness ended with his death, my grandmother’s particular hardship—the affliction of the caretaker—ended in full recovery. She “got better.” Her duties toward the dead man had been as completely discharged as his duties toward life. She not only went home to San Juan to “relax and visit with the family,” but soon was treating her Co-op City apartment (smaller than the place she’d moved out of, near Bronx Park, when it had become apparent that my grandfather wouldn’t be coming home again) like a way station where she dropped her bags and rested between frequent trips to Europe, South America, California, Las Vegas, and pretty much anyplace where some friend or relative would have her, indulging well into her eighties a wanderlust that apparently had built up, unsatisfied, during the years of her marriage.

I believe that some aspect of the relief the new widow felt (along with other conflicts trapped in the opaque amber of the past), or its expression, offended my mother deeply. My mother is like certain cats I have known who ally themselves with and bestow most of their affection on one particular human, tolerate some others, and have little use for the rest. For much of my mother’s early life, that human, I think, was my grandfather. She believed that my grandfather was ushered to his grave impatiently, almost gleefully, by my grandmother. As a consequence of this offense, and other, older ones, my grandmother became a criminal in our household; she was purged gradually from our emotional lives, and it occurred to me that death could begin an unraveling; that people themselves, their presence, held things together in ways that the memory of them never could.

Let me here append the first paragraph of this essay by suggesting that while another of the emotional purposes of organized mourning is to provide a comforting, if false, sense of death’s uniting us, the inherent function of death is to separate us, first from the deceased and then, in a process of extension, from others.

MEMPHIS, SUMMER 2007

A life builds momentum (we hope); we hope that as a product of that momentum the living agency of the people we love persists in the form of their memory: we hope that their influence, the power of their “aura,” buoys them, keeps them among the living, an illusion most convincing, I think, with the dead we love with narcissistic force. Last summer we drove into Memphis precisely on the August weekend when the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death would be commemorated municipally. It was not a somber occasion, although it wasn’t by any means clownish. The city fathers simply recognized that Elvis was and remains the star attraction of a very interesting town. It would have taken a certain mean-spiritedness to point out that in marking Elvis’s life with a festive commemoration coinciding with the anniversary of his death, it seemed unavoidably to be celebrating the death itself. Again, the thing wasn’t handled for comic effect; no souvenir miniature toilets mounted on pedestals thick with deep shag carpet denoting the place of the King’s last act of volition—the attempt to void his narcotics-paralyzed bowels—were on sale. The customary level of vulgarity, and no more, was evident: a sort of polymerized adoration falling somewhere between that accorded JFK and that accorded Padre Pio. There was also the complete elision of the terminal fact itself. An act of self-preservation, surely: “love with narcissistic force” is the phrase I used: because if Elvis lives on, then the corollary to such a formulation must be that when Elvis dies “a piece of Memphis dies too….” It was, in fact, shortly after Elvis’s death that I first heard the now familiar phrase about the dead—the recorded, published, filmed dead—“living on.” “The King may be gone,” the announcer’s voice said, “but the legend lives on!”

DEATH IN THE AGE OF DIGITAL PROLIFERATION

I know I’m supposed to like the idea of a person’s living on through some kind of legacy. Nowadays, certainly, with camcorders and HTML-enabled word-processing software, with Internet access, with free webpages and blogs, one has tools at hand to extend one’s presence, one’s utterances and likeness the length and breadth of the world, to be as omnipresent and plentiful as the heavenly stars and grains of sand to which God compared Abraham’s posterity—to become, in effect, one’s own posterity. The present ability to extend oneself beyond physical limitations as a result of the simplest act of will beggars the imagination; if every citizen of the world had been issued an airplane and a telephone early in the twentieth century, it would not have had the same impact. To be everywhere, forever! It’s a marvelous thing, especially since nothing in particular needs to be achieved in life in order for this eternally globally instantaneously transmitted monument to have a reason to exist. It exists as a universal extension of the brain; as a poignant illustration of the “fixed fantasies” that we carry with us (as the web presences, publicized by newspapers and other “gatekeeper” media, of various recently dead mass murderers have demonstrated).

If we accept, for the sake of argument, that this is a form of “living” (NB: I don’t accept it otherwise), then we need also to acknowledge that such perfected fantasy adumbrations of ourselves as websites, Facebook pages, and blogs also have as their corollary, trailing behind them, the inadvertent revenants of our less ideal lives. The best of several examples I saved to draw on for this essay is taken from a website called AOL Stalker, which purports to preserve, albeit under coded user IDs, the data concerning individuals’ web searches that AOL injudiciously, and somewhat scandalously, released a few years ago. What story, what remainder of a life, are we to infer from the quests of user #672378, lingering there?

curb morning sickness	2006-03-01 18:54:10
get fit while pregnant	2006-03-09 18:49:37
he doesn’t want the baby	2006-03-11 03:52:01
you’re pregnant he doesn’t want the baby	2006-03-11 03:52:58
online degrees theology	2006-03-11 04:05:24
online christian colleges	2006-03-11 04:13:33
barefoot contessa	2006-03-11 11:04:36
nightstand use	2006-03-11 22:09:02
why use a nightstand	2006-03-11 22:09:50
foods to eat when pregnant	2006-03-12 09:38:02
baby names	2006-03-14 19:11:10
baby names and meanings	2006-03-14 19:11:28
la tee da’s charlotte nc	2006-03-18 15:57:48
physician search	2006-03-23 10:20:04
taste of charlotte	2006-03-27 15:56:49
best pampering trips	2006-03-27 16:33:26
best spa vacation deals	2006-03-27 20:04:09
maternity clothes	2006-03-28 09:28:25
outlets gaffney sc	2006-03-28 10:44:40
pottery barn furniture outlet	2006-03-28 10:49:09
furniture outlets nc	2006-03-28 11:14:29
pregnancy workout videos	2006-03-29 10:01:39
buns of steel video	2006-03-29 10:12:38
what is yoga	2006-03-29 12:17:31
what is theistic	2006-03-29 12:18:19
what is theism	2006-03-29 12:18:30
hindu religion	2006-03-29 12:18:56
yoga and hindu	2006-03-29 12:32:05
is yoga aligned with christianity	2006-03-29 12:33:18
yoga and christianity	2006-03-29 12:33:42
whitney houston	2006-03-31 11:29:33
www.coffeecup.com	2006-03-31 11:39:45
the coffee cup charlotte nc	2006-03-31 11:40:09
ashley stewart	2006-04-01 13:19:07
lane bryant	2006-04-01 13:22:40
www.patients.digichart.com	2006-04-05 20:04:37
federal government jobs	2006-04-06 18:16:16
jewelry television	2006-04-06 19:06:03
abortion clinics charlotte nc	2006-04-17 11:00:02
greater carolinas womens center	2006-04-17 11:40:22
can christians be forgiven for abortion	2006-04-17 21:14:19
roe vs. wade	2006-04-17 22:22:07
www.livethroughmusic.com	2006-04-17 23:17:41
effects of abortion on fibroids	2006-04-18 06:50:34
effects of fibroids on abortion	2006-04-18 06:55:57
abortion fibroids	2006-04-18 06:59:32
abortion clinic charlotte	2006-04-18 15:14:03
symptoms of miscarriage	2006-04-18 16:14:07
mecklenburg aquatics center	2006-04-18 19:39:00
water aerobics charlotte nc	2006-04-18 19:41:27
abortion clinic charlotte nc	2006-04-18 21:45:49
50th birthday gift	2006-04-20 07:51:19
total woman vitamins	2006-04-20 16:38:16
esteem vitamins	2006-04-20 16:42:42
engagement gifts	2006-04-20 16:57:04
zales outlet	2006-04-20 17:41:03
50th birthday gift ideas	2006-04-20 17:50:16
mom’s turning	50 2006-04-20 17:51:13
high risk abortions	2006-04-20 17:53:49
abortion fibroid	2006-04-20 17:55:18
benefits of water aerobics	2006-04-20 23:25:50
new homes charlotte nc	2006-04-24 17:15:05
ethan allen	2006-04-25 15:55:48
wedding gown styles	2006-04-26 19:37:34
hewlitt packard computers	2006-05-05 13:15:15
ibm computers	2006-05-05 13:18:11
dell	2006-05-05 15:28:08
www.gateway	2006-05-05 19:12:13
notebook computer product reviews	2006-05-06 16:19:51
www.wedddingchannel.org	2006-05-06 21:22:18
define—oscillating	2006-05-07 11:21:35
st lawrence homes	2006-05-07 12:21:23
eastwood homes	2006-05-07 12:31:55
ryland homes	2006-05-07 12:41:41
www.substanceabusepreventionservices.org	2006-05-14 13:21:50
virginia credit union	2006-05-14 23:02:46
hgtv	2006-05-16 18:43:34
test taking tips	2006-05-18 14:49:58
northern star credit union	2006-05-19 18:23:08
hotel deals	2006-05-19 21:11:21
courtyard new carrollton	2006-05-19 23:27:55
dead sea scrolls	2006-05-19 23:35:13
dead sea scrolls discovery place	2006-05-19 23:35:44
blueletterbible.org	2006-05-21 07:24:00
recover after miscarriage	2006-05-22 18:17:53
travel deals	2006-05-24 16:27:52
combat uterine fibroids	2006-05-24 16:28:31
degenerative vertebrate	2006-05-25 20:58:19
degenerative disc	2006-05-25 20:59:16
demetrios bridesmaid dresses	2006-05-26 19:32:52
marry your live-in	2006-05-27 07:25:45
juice fasting	2006-05-31 11:54:14
www.healthyliving.com	2006-05-31 12:48:29
community pathways	2006-05-31 13:11:09
carolinas healthcare system	2006-05-31 13:12:48
family specialist	2006-05-31 13:17:29
what is the average merit raise	2006-05-31 13:31:41

The story here is truer than ego would ever permit; as unintended for public scrutiny as the telling gesture of a stranger on the street who believes she is unobserved—is it only the novelist who doesn’t require the name to envision the whole person? American dreams and worries are adrift, forever current, within the massive servers that conserve them—672378’s dreams of a baby, of a happy father for it, of a wedding; dreams of new furniture, a new home, of a getaway vacation, of a better job, of healthier ways of living; worries about sin, about the emotional and physical impact of medical ordeals; and those strange wild cards (nightstand use?); all will outlast the dark nights and bright days that gave rise to them. And as one reads this plain document, a simple enumeration of the complicated things on one woman’s mind, it’s difficult not to read into it—did 672378 look up miscarriage symptoms on May 14 so that she could smoothly lie about having “lost” the baby after having an abortion? Did she resolve to have the child with or without “him” only to suffer a miscarriage around May 21? Did she lose the baby because of some substance abuse problem she belatedly sought help with? Did “he” have the substance abuse problem? But as long as it endures, and as true, as minutely real, as it is, this is no second and more durable life, it is only another document positing with each affirmative the expansiveness of the unknown awaiting our interpretation, and interpretation is no more than the empty hole we fill with our own reckoning. Elvis does not “live on” death is that moment when any possibility of learning the unknown is lost, when the inadequate sum of what is known becomes the totality of what there is to know.

Narratologically, this isn’t much help. What we like and respond to, in forming the narratives that give our lives and those around us coherent meaning, is something far more than the unadorned accounting of 672378’s lonely keystrokes. Think of De Palma’s Black Dahlia, in which Aaron Eckhart pretending to be a detective watches Mia Kirshner pretending to be the murdered Elizabeth Short pretending to be someone else in one of the silent stag movies she made; Eckhart’s rapt face is a testament to the phony power of “living on.”

MY FATHER

If I seem to be cynical about a perfectly inoffensive way of ordering reality, it may be because of my father. I tried all this business with him (let me say here that the building-up-to-it method I discuss above proved to be of absolutely no help in dealing with his illness and death; the absence of his particular presence ruined who I’d been and made a different man of me) and it made no sense. My father was a wonderful writer (pace the blogger—another potential immortal, of course—who wrote that 2006 was turning out to be a great year for literature because Pynchon had published another book and Sorrentino had died), and as such his books leave me with something of considerable substance, but it was as a father that I loved him. Besides, the books make up an artistic legacy, and a public one; there are scores of “sons” out there who can take from those books precisely what I can, and who have no interest in trying to extract from them what I can’t, his essence.

That’s thorny, isn’t it? Another thing we want to believe is that the artist invests himself in his work. Wit, intelligence, facility, profundity, skill, style—all are present, each individually amounts to more than the whole of 672378’s found drama, but neither are they life.

I made a Super 8 film of my father once; like nearly everything else from my childhood, it’s long gone. It was an actual filmmaking project, titled Pop on Memorial Day, which suggests that a suitable subtitle might have indicated that I was home from school, bored, and probably had received the camera about ten days earlier for my birthday. Certainly, I wasn’t thinking of posterity; I was thinking about getting the developed reel back from the lab and running it through my little Bell & Howell projector. Does he live on in this film in a way that he does not through his books? Certainly, if it were to be restored to me, the film would depict many of the lost corners of my life, because for my parents (unlike for me) only a handful of material things ever accrued sufficient sentimental value to require their preservation, but the film would only confirm the things, in altogether inadequate shadowed blurs, that no document is necessary for me to remember, and the memory of my parents’ tables and chairs, appliances and decorations, the combination of the timeless comforts of high bohemia and the dated 1970s particulars, is more than enough.

The memory of my father is not enough. When I think abstractly of “my father,” the image my mind summons forth is of him at about this time—1973, when he was a year younger than I am now—and of his ultrapredictable habits and mannerisms I would likewise never need a film to remind me of. The only time my father ever surprised me was when he got sick and died.

My father would have ridiculed the suggestion that he’d devoted his life to leaving a record of himself, or of his thoughts, and he would have been especially scornful of the idea that a record of any kind could substitute for, let alone possess, life. He wanted to make things that were beautiful yet, as he put it once, “do not live.” He made that clear to me so that I’d always know it. What I always knew I should have known better; I look at the shelves and shelves of books—about twenty-five hundred, I figured during a recent move—everything lying in wait within the dark pages between the two covers, every conceivable situation, and the inconceivable ones, helping not a bit.