death and the internet

A while ago I was planning on writing a post about this Korean model named Daul Kim who had committed suicide and whose blog used to be available to the general public. (I still have a link to her blog in my links list, and I've decided to keep it there as a testament to her presence in the world, even if the police have made the blog restricted). All of her writing was interesting, poetic, disjointed. Almost all of her posts were titled "Say hi to..." and her last post was "Say Hi to Forever," although it was just a post where she embedded a youtube video. Throughout the entirety of the blog were references to her hopes and the future--indicators that she imagined living past the age of 20, although she did not.

At the time I was reading about her death and avidly reading her blog, I felt like I was in an internet car crash. The traffic has backed up for a second as everyone takes a moment to twist their necks and look at the damage. And now, as more and more people are making the internet part of their daily lives, we have more and more internet crashes available to us. When someone dies, their internet persona lives on, although in stasus. Now we can look at how people respond to the dead person's memory through the equivalent of online tombstones--is it even fair to remove a departed's facebook profile? The profile becomes digital proof that yes, this person existed.

Let's bring it all back to yesterday. As of yesterday at 3 PM, I still hadn't gotten around to writing about Daul Kim's death and her blog--in fact, I probably never was going to write about it. But then I got a call with some very bad news. My friend (and my good girl friend's husband) died unexpectedly. It's been fewer than 24 hours since I've gotten this news and it still wrenches my heart whenever I think about it clearly. To say that I lost someone when I was 22 for the rest of my life: that is a heavy burden to bear. And yet, I keep looking at his facebook profile. I can't stop. I barely looked at it when he was alive because I just don't really look that closely at my friends' facebook profiles. But now every shred of evidence of who he was and what he believed that made its way to the profile is important to me. I've gone back several times. I think about whether I should post something, or whether anyone will post anything. I wonder where he is now. I sent him a message on facebook. It was not that sentimental. I just wish I could hear him tell me to take care of myself one more time.

A memory, although not a digital one: My friends and I were playing "Loaded questions: Adult Version." It's a silly game where the group gets asked a question and everyone writes down their individual answers. Then the judge hears the answers to the question without knowing who wrote them and has to try to guess which answers matches which of the players. One of the questions during the game asked the players to compliment someone else in the room. My departed friend's answer was this "Essnk, you giggle a lot." I loved that compliment. It said so much about the person giving it--that he thought the fact that I giggled stated plainly was a compliment. I laughed for what felt like hours when I heard the response. This memory is something I keep coming back to, in the short amount of time since I heard that he passed away. I just keep thinking about giggling and wishing that I could be there to giggle for him again. That maybe, somehow, giggling could have solved anything.

These are the things I think about when I cling desparately to his internet presence. I just wanted the Essnk community to be aware of something I am going through. As this blog is a part of me now, I needed to write about this death.