Why must technology keep on reminding me I’ve just lost Mum?
The day after Donald Trump was elected, I got an email from my mother. There was one word in the subject line: ‘DISASTeR!’.
She had, she said, been lying semiawake in bed, and then switched on the radio and had an ‘ awful shock’. Two days later, she tripped on the stairs and broke her hip.
When I went to visit her in hospital, she told me she was so upset by Trump’s victory that she had literally lost her balance. That night, she sent me an email saying: ‘ Thank you for coming to visit me.’ It was the last email I received from her.
Strangely, I did get other emails from her address while she was in hospital. ‘Anne Patterson’, read the sender’s name in my inbox, a name that always cheered me up. They weren’t from my mother though. They were from my brother. Sitting at my mother’s computer, he was contacting my mother’s friends about when they could visit her, and forwarding me their replies.
In fact, the very last email I had from ‘Anne Patterson’ was actually a forwarded message from the woman who ran her book group.
I received that email five weeks after my mother tripped on that stair, and two days after she died. My brother was letting me know about people he had contacted, but still it was a shock.
It wasn’t the only one I received from the virtual world in which we now spend so much of our time.
Six months later, I found a voicemail I’d missed. I was scrolling down my phone while waiting for a bus, and suddenly saw the word ‘Mum’. I tapped the message icon and placed the phone to my ear. There it was, her beautiful voice, singing happy Birthday.
I thought I was going to have to lie down on the pavement and howl.
It’s always devastating to lose someone you love, but grief is different now. When my sister died 18 years ago, aged 41, there were no voicemails stacked up on my phone in the aftermath. We didn’t have smartphones. She had never sent an email. Nor had my father, when he died two years later, in 2002.
NoW,we find traces of the people we have lost in so many unexpected places. everyone leaves a ‘ digital footprint’, a ghost presence on our phones, be it old texts, voicemails or contact details we can’t bear to delete.
In a way that just wasn’t true before, we carry our dead wherever we go.
My mother was not on Facebook or any other social media sites. I’m relieved she wasn’t. I’ve heard a few stories of people who have had reminders of anniversaries for people who have died — automated invitations to send a loved one birthday wishes, for instance.
These are not always prompted by some social media algorithm: there are people who have continued to post on the Facebook pages of dead friends and relatives long after they have gone.
But the system does encourage it. I heard about one woman who was asked to ‘ connect’ with her dead father on professional networking site LinkedIn.
I heard about a man who spotted his dead father mowing the lawn on Google earth.
Traditional photos of a loved one used be tough enough to view. It was weeks before I could bring myself to open one of my mother’s albums. There were, I have to say, an awful lot of them.
My mother was a would- be Instagrammer before the social media platform was invented. She took photos of every social occasion, every meeting with a friend, every meeting with her daughter and every meeting with her son.
So I was thankful that, among all the things we had to do after she died, at least we didn’t have to deal with her social media or decide what to do about the precious photos or memories she might have uploaded.
I know that for some people going through bereavement, social media can be a source of consolation. A Facebook page of someone who has died doesn’t have to be a source of pain. Facebook will delete the account if you want it to, but it also offers the opportunity to ‘ memorialise’ it. This option means the word ‘Remembering’ is then put next to the person’s name on the site and friends can share memories on their timeline.
‘The digital age,’ says therapist Andy Langford, chief operating officer of the bereavement charity Cruse, ‘has opened up a whole set of different mediums that relate to how people are considering processing grief and remembering people who have died.’
‘There have,’ he says, ‘been quite a few cases where having a publicised memorial on a site has been really helpful — sharing those memories of a loved one with a wider group, and using that as a way to celebrate their life.
‘Yes, it is partly remembering that they died, but it’s largely
about celebrating their life.’ And it isn’t just Facebook. There are a number of memorial sites now that allow people to build up a repository of memories. A quick tap into a search engine and there they all are: muchloved. com, gonetoosoon. org, inmemoryof. co.uk, friendsandrelations.com.
Many are free of charge, at least for a certain amount of text and a few photos.
Some aren’t. Death, as anyone who has ever had to pay for a funeral will tell you, can also be a nice little earner.
In many ways, these sites are just a more sophisticated version of what we’ve always had: photo albums, books of remembrance, even recordings of conversations. After my father died, my mother kept his voice on the answering machine for quite a while. She said it was so would-be burglars wouldn’t think she was alone, but I know that she sometimes used to dial her own number, just to hear his voice.
The main difference now is that multimedia options allow you to get something more like a cinematic experience of the person you’ve lost.
To be honest, I find an old photo quite poignant enough.
If you’re really organised, you can even arrange for digital versions of your own ‘last words’.
Afternote.com allows you to leave messages for friends and relatives
after you’ve gone. You can collect your most important photos and information about your life. You can start a bucket list ( to be completed before you depart this world). You can leave your final wishes for your funeral.
My mother was so organised she didn’t need that. In a file marked ‘my funeral’, she had left a long list of instructions, including suggestions of pubs for the wake.
She also mentioned a barn, in the grounds of a stately home near the crematorium, but next to it, in capital letters and brackets had written (Too BIG). If she had known about afternote. I’m sure she would have been tapping in her password and adding daily instructions for those of us left behind.
DuRINGthe 15 months since my mother died, there have been many moments when I have been ambushed by grief. There was the moment, the truly horrific moment, when my iPad suddenly started playing a movie called ‘highlights of 2016’.
There was music. There were photos of my friends, flashing up in a syncopated rhythm to the music, and then of my new sofa, my friend’s dog. And then, after the dog, there was a photo of my mother, lying on a hospital bed, draped in a sheet.
It had taken me three hours to get to the hospital, and by the time I arrived, she was dead. I hadn’t been sure whether I should take the photo. And I hadn’t looked at it until that moment, when it popped up as a ‘highlight’ on my screen.
Two months ago, we finally buried my mother’s ashes. I watched as my brother put the casket in the grave.
At first, the hole wasn’t big enough. It had cost £575 to have it dug, but it still wasn’t big enough. Fortunately, my brother is a gardener and had his tools in the car. he whipped out his spade and sliced an extra chunk of earth off.
The vicar spoke. My brother spoke. We sang The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is ended.
And then I realised that it had ended, this episode of time that had started with an email entitled ‘DISASTeR!’.
I put a red rose on the casket and said a last goodbye to the human being I have always loved most.
At the funeral, by the way, the funeral my mother tried to plan, I had to cancel the booking in the pub and move the wake to the barn.
For once, my mother was wrong. It was not ‘Too BIG’. It was the pub that was far too small.
ChristinA PAtterson’s next novel, the Art of not Falling Apart, is out in May. You can pre-order it at amazon.co.uk.