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I was intrigued recently when I came upon an advice column in Wired magazine addressing the very conundrum I had faced following my mother's death in January, 2010: How soon after the loved one departs should one deactivate the Facebook account? Oh, the ethical quandaries we face in the age of social media.
My mother never fully understood Facebook. She gave it her best shot anyway, because that's how she was with everything. Lack of aptitude be damned. She couldn't, for instance, figure out how to upload a profile picture, so hers remained one of those default head-and-shoulders silhouettes that signify incompleteness. After her death at the age of 69, her Facebook account endured and the silhouette immediately felt more like a ghost.
For a year or more, I think, the silhouette haunted my Facebook feed almost exactly as would a troubled spirit. It popped up, randomly and inappropriately, half hidden amongst living-and-breathing profile pics, no doubt at the behest of an algorithm that is also now long since dead. Mostly, I tried to ignore these visitations, simultaneously feeling grief and annoyance. My mother had never really belonged on Facebook and she certainly did not belong now.
Unable to grasp the functionality of instant messaging, she had sent me e-mails asking how to do this or that within Mark Zuckerberg's masterwork. I answered, even while knowing that the information would be minimally useful to her. In her final years, she had returned to live in her hometown of Fraserburgh, a tiny former fishing village on the northeast coast of Scotland.
Although the move seemed a form of self-imposed exile, any means of staying in contact with her friends and family in Canada was of interest to her, even through something as perplexing as Facebook.
Headstrong and daring, my mother had been firmly committed to self-determination long before she divorced my father when I was 15. She'd been a beauty queen, had a weakness for charismatic men and did not hesitate to recalibrate her life when she felt it necessary. That's why, many years later, the decision to return to Scotland was not entirely a surprise, even if her motivations were never fully clear.
In 2006, she arrived in Fraserburgh with a flourish and set herself up in a rent-assisted flat located a short drive from the craggy coast. She'd redecorated and, not surprisingly, found gentleman friends to do the heavy lifting. That charming twinkle in her eye stayed with her to the end.
She was a quick-witted and articulate woman. In one of our transatlantic e-mail exchanges, she quoted an Irish blessing: "May you get safely up to heaven before the devil knows you're dead."
She was using the expression as a playful scold but it stayed with me mostly because it seemed more applicable to her life than to mine.
Drew Shannon for the Globe and Mail
Later, I wrote a song that used the blessing as its title. Although not directly about my mother, the bittersweet jig explores the mix of feelings you might experience when someone dear to you sees fit to merrily breeze out of your life. Lyrics for the first verse go like this:
You've been wandering through the highlands
For 30 years or more
And you're not averse to knocking
Upon a stranger's door
Your eyes are shining icy blue
Your blood is flowing red
May you get safely up to heaven before the devil knows you're dead
She was a loving and committed parent, but my mother's nonchalance could challenge those closest to her – and it, too, could be haunting. It seems that in the weeks before her death, she'd parcelled together some novelty Christmas gifts and sent a package to me across the waves via regular mail. In late January, a few days after my sister, her partner and I had returned from Fraserburgh (where we had grimly cleaned out my mother's apartment and arranged a funeral service), without warning or fanfare the tattered package arrived at my door, tattooed with postal stickers and markings. It was a heartbreaking, yet, somehow fitting gift from the grave.
All of which brings us back to the sage wisdom of the advice columnist in Wired.
Once he had constructed an overwrought analogy referencing how characters had slowly vanished from family snapshots in the film Back to the Future, the etiquette expert concluded that the digital life records in our Facebook accounts should be left alone.
He reasoned: Doesn't time already erase enough?
In a general sense, perhaps I'd agree, but certainly not in my mother's case. Her scattered and half-baked Facebook presence in no way mirrored the vitality with which she lived. To let it wander indefinitely in an online purgatory would be a disservice to her memory.
It wasn't easy, but eventually I deactivated the account, ending the spooky silhouette visitations. I felt some minor relief and maybe a smidgen of closure. But now, at the age of 50, with my first child due literally any day, more than ever I am missing my mother.
Her name was Dorothy and, these days, I even miss her Facebook ghost.
Tony Martins lives in Aylmer, Que.