Dec 26/22: Facebook

Ok. I’m back on Facebook

After 8 years away.

Before you judge, let me say,

It’s for all the right reasons:

Self promotion, marketing, business,

You know.

But here’s an outcome unexpected:

I stumbled across my dead Dad there.

Indeed dead these last 2 years.

Well, “stumbled across” is not exactly right.

I searched to see if he was still there,

The waves of grief having substantially receded.

The ocean now at low tide.

Yes, remarkably he lives on in the fb world.

His life digitalized in bits and bytes.

His remains remain and contained in social media urn.

It’s as if no one told Facebook Cam

His ticket was punched.

His biscuit bitten.

There’s something intensely vulnerable

About his perpetual state,

Captured and kept in the cloud.

A prisoner of old choices.

No chance for redemption or redo

A life laid out like laundry on a line,

Suspended on posts,

Frozen in subzero time.

Despite his dead and decaying true self,

Carefully-curated Cam rests there in virtual peace

Alongside his older and not-so-carefully-curated self.

The ravages of time chronicled.

That darn dementia documented.

Both Cams still on display for all to see.

(As I write this another Cam invades my memory

—robust-voicemail Cam—

Carefully recorded 10 years before his death.

Strong, confident, loud, and sure,

As over against his true self who had moved on

To fearful frailty and hypophonia,

That jarring recording for years mocking his declining reality,

Reaching out from the past announcing:

“This is who you once were

And no longer are.”

Just now I tried to call his number,

Just to hear his voice.

But it seems that too is disconnected.)

Back to Facebook:

There lie the remains of a dwindling life.

First, scraps of posthumous remembrances

Followed by birthday wishes marking successive years as he,

At the command of simple swipes, becomes magically younger.

The posted evidence of mental decline makes way

To greater and greater lucidity.

Confused and confusing entries yield to clarity.

As this account of his life journey is scrolled in reverse.

A strange mixture of nostalgic grief,

Alongside a kind of tender embarrassment

(For the nakedness of age)

Overcomes me and I think,

Surely there’s much more than this,

This creeping the dead,

This short visit; a kind of voyeur vista

Through the virtual window

Of a life lived.

Surely memory serves as a better repository

Than this computerized cistern—

Its contents small and fragmentary—

Not even close to containing his life:

Alive, large, overflowing.

And, I have a feeling, I was better off

Before this visit to Facebook Cam,

The images now nestling

Into memory’s montage