A word about Facebook
Randy died at 3pm on a Friday. I had been sitting with him for a couple of days with various daughters cycling in and out and a paid carer staying overnight so I could sleep. He was non-responsive, we knew he didn’t have much time left, and I hope to god he wasn’t in pain. When he stopped breathing I took a few minutes to pull myself together so I could call the two daughters and son who weren’t there. I called the hospice nurse so she could do the formal pronouncement of death. When she arrived we called the funeral home to ask them to come and collect his body. I texted the carer that he had died and she didn’t need to come to stay.
We sat with the body for a while - one daughter went home to her kids, two other daughters arrived. We waited maybe an hour and a half for someone to get his body and I didn’t feel like I could watch. I could hear them moving furniture, unfolding the gurney - it was just painful and sad. I wasn’t willing to stay in the house with the hospital bed, and bless my son-in-law for somehow manhandling it down the stairs and out to the garage. I gathered up all the medical supplies, stuffed everything in bags and put them out in the garage as well.
And then I sent everyone home. It was very quiet and I felt literally stunned - conscious but disconnected from everything. Daughters had offered to call people and let them know, but no one but me knew who to call, where contact information was, and how much information each person had. It had been a really long, horrible day and I was in no hurry to get in touch with people - thought everyone but family could wait another day. I wanted to just sit with things for a while and gather my strength for the difficult conversations.
Saturday morning I woke up to texts from two of Randy’s closest friends sounding like they already knew he was dead, and then one of them called and I let it go to voicemail. I was confused and discombobulated and had the sense that things were descending on me. How could they already know? How had I lost control of my personal narrative?
Eventually I called Randy’s friend Matt back to give him the details and asked how he had known. Fucking Facebook, that’s how. Randy’s ex-wife Rene had posted on FB less than 24 hours after he died so she could tell all her friends how sad she was. Matt had gone to high school with us 40-some years ago so he was a FB friend with Rene, though they hadn’t spoken in decades. And that’s how he found out - he got up in the morning and scrolled through his FB posts and was surprised to find that one of his best friends in the world had died.