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Frowny Face Condolences

“Could we please put on our grammatical Sunday-best in matters of life and death?”

Some friends and I have noted a distressing trend, the noticing of which may make us ‘old’ or ‘old-fashioned’ or even dare I say, ‘persnickety’.  I prefer to frame it as ‘retaining a sense of decorum’.  Social networking has granted us the perverse contradiction of being better connected with everyone and yet far less engaged with the same.  So, while Twitter and Facebook status updates let me know if you have a cold or your cat is M.I.A. or your doctorate thesis was well-received, I may not have spoken to you for more than four months.

Subsequently, I have learned of impending break-ups and divorces via social networking sites, complete with trite, diminishing icons such as Facebook’s ‘broken heart’, i.e. “[broken heart] Paul is no longer in a relationship.” Then the subject is flooded with emails, wall posts and comments along the lines of, “Ohhh nooooo! What happened?”  The broken heart icon comes about when one makes changes to one’s Facebook profile, and more than one broken-hearted friend has been chagrined by the unintentional broadcasting of their bad news.  Worse yet are announcements of love lost in status updates or other bulletin-board-y modes. By far the most disconcerting to date was when a friend told me of his impending divorce on the message board of our Scrabulous (R.I.P.) game.  Okay, so Twitter and Facebook are easy, quick ways to let a lot of people know something you would like them to know. It can also, I have found, serve as a way of saying something you would rather not say, or imparting news you would rather not have, to wit, illness and death.

I think most of us have received news of a loved one’s loss through e-mail, or other kinds of mass distributed messaging. Of course in times like that who wants to spend hours on the phone, repeating something so painful and difficult to say in the first place?

Recently, a friend lost her father, with whom she had had a complicated relationship. What was novel was that she posted updates on his health, at times cryptically worded, on Facebook and likely elsewhere, probably from her iPhone outside the hospital. When he finally passed, she posted something along the lines of, “Dying looks so different than I thought it would.”  So, that was an odd way of sharing difficult news during a difficult time. It would not have been my first choice.

What disturbed me far, far more than her posting the updates were the unintentionally glib and silly comments posted by friends in response, most attempting a helpful, supportive or consoling vein.  Their undoing was their structure; their syntax and grammar and spelling:

Sorry UR dad died.

U never really lose people because they R always in UR heart.

Let us set aside for the moment my penchant for fully and properly spelled words, not to mention sounding like an adult and not a 12 year-old girl.  Instead, let us examine the complete negation of emotion accomplished by these ‘drive-thru’ sentiments, these Hannah Montana platitudes.  We are all plugged into something hollow here and I am frankly aghast.  Frowny faces should be reserved for pedestrian use.  Could we please put on our grammatical Sunday-best in matters of life and death? Frowny facing someone’s death is a new high in lows, beyond the pale.

Let us suppose that she wanted support and condolences on Facebook, or that she wanted answering gestures to her gesture. She did set a precedence with her status updates. However, y’all couldn’t spell that shite out?  Y’all gonna whip out some emoticon, the same one you used when the puppy cam was down?

Please people, let us make a pact today: when true tragedy visits and people we love (or know or met once at a party, or never met in person) are suffering, are grappling with enormous and painful circumstances, let us dust off our grown-up words and our grown-up emotions and try to make a real connection, to offer true comfort and support, if comfort and support be your aim.

[ Topic Ridiculosity, Society | No Comments ]