There are many ways me and my parents’ generation differ. One that became oh so clear yesterday was how we find out about the end of someone’s life.
For my parents, they usually find out through phone conversations or the bump-in at the grocery store. After the normal chit-chat, there usually comes a pause and something along the lines of, “Oh…did you hear about Billy’s boy?” Then, both parties would exchange thoughts on Billy’s son and why the death was so unbelievable (or expected, if that’s the case). On the rare occasions that there was no conversation about said death, my parents usually found out when they saw someone “up on the board” at the local funeral home. Then, they’d usually be calling someone to tell them about the name they just saw at White’s.
But then there’s my generation. Last year my roommate randomly decided to check up on a high school best friend via her myspace page, only to find she’d been killed days before in a car accident. Her friends had plastered comments immediately, grieving about how much they missed her, and that was how M. found out about her friend’s death.
And yesterday I opened up an e-mail to my j-school listserve announcing the death of a former resident of mine. Although I’d only spoken with him once or twice since my graduation, I couldn’t help but well up with tears as I read through his blog, chronicling his three-time diagnosis with cancer over the past four years. He was so young…so innocent (his freshman-year nickname was Sweetpea); I couldn’t believe such a genuinely sweet person had passed away in his mid-20s.
Thinking about how short life is and how much it rarely makes sense, the most frustrating part of it was that I had nobody to share that with. My parents could at least discuss it with the messenger. But with our generation…except for the most close of friends or family…that news comes not from a face-to-face conversation or phone call. But we learn our news from a computer.
And although it’s speedier and we learn things about far-off friends, well, sometimes you just want to see a face that scrunches up when delivering the news. Or to hear a sigh that says, “I know. Wow, huh?”
