The Tech-Wise Family

images 10. We show up in person for the big events of life. We learn how to be human by being fully present at our moments of greatest vulnerability. We hope to die in one another’s arms.

Early in our marriage, Catherine and I made a commitment that has in turn dictated a hundred other decisions over the years. We decided that every time we were invited to a wedding or a funeral, unless circumstances made it truly impossible, at least one of us would go. We would cancel or reschedule anything else we had planned, and spend any money we had, to be present in person.

The value of commitments like this is they make decision making easier. When wedding invitations have arrived over the years, or we have learned of someone’s death and the family’s desire to have us there for their funeral, we haven’t had to decide whether to go. The question is simply how. Though there have been a few times when it was, to our great regret, impossible for us to travel, this already-made decision has served us well over and over and given us some of the most memorable and transformative experiences of our lives.

One of the great gifts of technology is the simulation of presence at a distance. Starting with the telephone (which literally means “distant speech”), and continuing in recent years with Skype and FaceTime, we have been able to communicate, with higher and higher fidelity, with people far away. Now that our son is in college, thirteen hundred miles from home, we have a weekly video call as a family that has brought some of the best conversations we have had in his whole life—at no cost beyond the devices and services we already have.

Of course, much of the distance between us and people we love is itself the result of technology. It is partly because of air travel that we can imagine sending our children thousands of miles away from home in the first place; we can move away from our parents for a new job, or simply a more exciting location, knowing that we can visit them with a relatively easy car or plane trip. Technology, which does so much to close the distance, also enables much of the distance in our lives.

But even the highest quality Skype connection is not enough for the really important moments in a human life. You can think of it purely in terms of information, which can be measured as a stream of digital bits. A high-definition video call transmits something like 1.2 megabits per second1 and can provide amazingly clear sound and images of the person we are talking with. But when we are present in person with another human being, our bodies are probably taking in and absorbing many gigabits per second—a thousand times more information. This information is not just in the form of sight and sound, both far richer and more subtle in person than even the highest quality connection can provide, but potentially comes through all the other primary senses as well: touch and smell and even taste. And almost certainly our bodies sense another person’s presence in ways that we are not even aware of, let alone able to record or transmit. Any sort of mediated presence is the palest shadow of what it is like to be with another person in person—that is, present in the fullness of what our bodies make possible.

This is why Catherine and I decided that being present, in person, at the moments in human life that are truly unique and unrepeatable was worth any sacrifice of time or money. Only by showing up in person can we feel and grasp the full weight, joy, and vulnerability of the most important experiences in human life.

So the last, best commitment we can make in our mediated world is to show up, especially for the moments when we are most deeply human—which is to say, most deeply connected to our bodies. In old wedding vows the groom would say, as he put the ring on his bride’s finger, “With my body I thee worship.” A Christian wedding unites two bodies in such a way that they become not “one soul” but “one flesh.” Although many couples cherish the video recordings of their wedding, no one should aspire to be married by video. Showing up in person at a wedding, even just as a guest, is a way of honoring that bodily commitment, just as showing up in person at a funeral is a way of honoring the fullness of the one we loved. And these public moments are so significant because they correspond to even more profoundly intimate bodily realities. Though these invitations are rarer, for good reasons, there is nothing so holy as to be present for a birth—or for a death.

When we show up, especially in the course of family life, we encounter what technology tries so hard to delay or erase: the limits and fragility of our bodies.

Our families care for us as infants, when our bodies are impossibly small and fragile and incapable, at first, of even the simplest self-care. They see us wail with distress as well as laugh in delight. They hold us close in those first weeks and smell perhaps the most amazing aroma in all of human experience, the fragrance of a newborn child—or they smell some of the most noxious odors a human body can produce.

Our parents see us in the gangly awkwardness of adolescence, and adolescents see their own parents subtly softening (and often fattening!) into middle age.

We see one another, at all ages, laid low by fever, noses running with colds, or bent over the toilet in nausea—and these are just the most common and unremarkable sicknesses. Our families also see us in far graver circumstances—coming home from what was meant to be a routine exam with a terrifying diagnosis; recovering from life-saving but physically devastating surgery; reeling from sudden and permanent change from accident or war or violence; descending gradually but unmistakably into confusion and dementia, no longer able even to recognize the ones we have most loved.

And our families see us, and we see them, in the final passage of life. I believe it was the author Wendell Berry who made the devastating observation that in every family that gathers around the Thanksgiving dinner table, one member will one day be left entirely alone, having buried all the others. We bind ourselves to one another with all our love and loyalty, but one day all those bonds will be severed by loss.

If there is anything we would do with technology if we could, it would be to cheat death. Indeed, our modern science and all the technology it provides us emerged in no small part from exactly that quest—the alchemists’ search for the philosopher’s stone, the substance that would turn other metals to gold and give mortals immortality.

And indeed, in all kinds of ways technology has given many of us, for long seasons of life, something close to easy-everywhere health—antibiotics that almost magically halt the invasion of bacteria, anesthesia that makes possible procedures that would have been inconceivable before, even various ways to stave off the most obvious forms and signs of aging. But this very success has reawakened the alchemists’ old dream: discovering a way of manipulating the world that would save us from ever having to die.

The actual result of a technological pursuit of everlasting life will be, for many who attempt it, a life that is ultimately not worth living: ending one’s days not at home in the care of family but in the purposely sterile, impersonal, technology-stuffed environment of a hospital, at incredible expense, enduring ever more invasive “heroic” measures until we finally expire. Alarmingly, there is evidence from research that the people most likely to request these futile but fantastically expensive final measures are actually Christians—the very ones who should be most able to trust their mortal bodies to the care of God.2 Something has gone wrong when atheists and secular people are more able to face the inevitable reality of death than the people who should believe that death has been conquered and does not have to be feared.

The tech-wise family will choose a different way. We will recognize that our daily bodily vulnerabilities, our illnesses, and our final journey to death are our best chance to reject technology’s easy-everywhere promise. We will embrace something better: the wisdom of knowing our own limits, the courage to care for one another, and, just as difficult, the courage to accept one another’s care when we cannot care for ourselves. We will put love into practice in the most profound possible way, by being present with one another in person at the greatest and most difficult moments of life.

For one thing we can say for sure is that when we are at our body’s very limits, nothing but personal presence will do. A few years ago I had the great gift of being invited into the bedroom of my friend David Sacks, born in 1968 just like me but brought to the end of his life by cancer that, by the time it was discovered, had erupted throughout his body. After a glorious and grace-filled year of life made possible by medical treatment, David’s illness outran the drugs. In his last days he lay on his bed. The body that once had effortlessly beaten me in game after game of squash was now unbearably thin and weak. David was an internationally celebrated photographer, but he would never make another image. He had sent me countless text messages over the years—I never will have the heart to delete them from my phone—but now he was beyond text messaging. He had created a Facebook group where he and his wife, Angie, chronicled the story of his cancer diagnosis, treatment, and all the ups and downs that followed, but he would never again update it.

But he was still there, still with us, still able, just barely, to hear us praying and singing—able, in moments of lucidity, to open his eyes, take in the small group of family and friends gathered around his bed, and know he was not alone. His brother brought a guitar and we sang, several nights in a row, Matt Redman’s song “10,000 Reasons.”

The technology was over. The easy-everywhere dream had ended. Now we could only be here, in our own vulnerable bodies, present to the immensely hard reality of a friend, father, son, and husband dying. Over the bed was a framed, calligraphed rendering of David and Angie’s wedding vows.

It was one of the hardest places I have ever been. It was one of the most holy places I have ever been. It was one of the best places I have ever been.

We are meant to build this kind of life together: the kind of life that, at the end, is completely dependent upon one another; the kind of life that ultimately transcends, and does not need, the easy solutions of technology because it is caught up in something more true and more lasting than any alchemy our technological world can invent. We are meant to be family—not just marriages bound by vows and the children that come from them, but a wider family that invites others into our lives and even to the threshold of our very last breath, to experience vulnerability and grace, sorrow and hope, singing our way homeward. We are meant not just for thin, virtual connections but for visceral, real connections to one another in this fleeting, temporary, and infinitely beautiful and worthwhile life. We are meant to die in one another’s arms, surrounded by prayer and song, knowing beyond knowing that we are loved.

We are meant for so much more than technology can ever give us—above all, for the wisdom and courage that it will never give us. We are meant to spur one another along on the way to a better life, the life that really is life.