Mortality

There is a small bar in the east end of Toronto that is popular among locals. The bar is unassuming in almost every way: the tables and chairs are cozy but non-descript, the drink selection is robust but simple, and the service is friendly but unadorned. This bar, Hitch, is the perfect kind of place to go for some good conversation, and possibly some spirited debate, with friends after a long day at work.

I learned quickly that the bar was named after Christopher Hitchens, acclaimed writer and avid drinker. It is fitting that a bar suited for conversation and discussion would be named after a writer who inspired spirited debate, who wasn't afraid to take controversial stances and then stand by them despite the onslaught of negative backlash. The bar, Hitch, is a wonderful part of Mr. Hitchens' legacy: a place for people to drink and share their thoughts and opinions.

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I've been thinking a lot about legacy recently, and with that, thoughts of mortality. The two are intrinsically intertwined, as any talk of legacy needs to be accompanied by the realization that we are all mortal, and the acceptance that our mortality is what drives our need to leave that legacy.

My friend Sakura died eleven years ago in a car accident. She left behind a legacy of kindness and generosity, of an unparalleled joie de vivre and love for nature. When I am on Toronto Island, I often sit on the bench that bears a nameplate with her name, in memoriam. From time to time, I return to her still-existing Flickr profile to see markers of that legacy, of her character, that shone through her photos and interactions.

Now that we carry computers and cameras in our pockets — importantly, now that those two devices are the same thing, for many — we are building up an incredible amount of digital detritus that will follow us much past the time of our deaths. We are building our unconscious legacies, the ways in which we will be remembered, through comments and photos and scribbles left across the web. And yet, for most of us, those legacies, those memories will stop long before we actually die; most of us do not chronicle the act of dying the way we chronicle our acts of living, because that would mean facing and accepting our mortality.

That may be changing. Capturing the process of death, previously an artistic endeavor, is becoming easier — both in practice and in emotional capacity — in the age of the internet. A recent piece by Laurence Scott about virtual selves and death sees a future when the digital realm will include the end of life just as much as the rest of life:

There has long been evidence of an artistic impulse to capture the details of death when it occurs. Several millennia since the earliest Egyptian death masks, the Impressionist painter Claude Monet could not help analysing the changing colours of his wife Camille's skin after she died. This intense observation resulted in his 1879 portrait “Camille on Her Death Bed”. In our century, Annie Leibovitz photographed the corpse of her lover Susan Sontag, saying later that to do so seemed a natural extension of her artistic practice. The Scottish novelist John Niven wrote in a 2013 essay how his brother's suicide immediately prompted him to shape it in words: “I excused myself from my mother and sister, who were weeping in each other's arms, and went into the bathroom. I locked the door, sat down with my little Moleskine notebook, and recorded everything that had just happened: the angle of light from the window above the bed, the coiling pale blue lines of the monitors.”

Digital technologies encourage and democratise this artistic impulse, enabling any of us to document and disseminate moments of dying. And the various forms of social media give dying people a new sort of vitality. As I argue in my recent book on digital life, The Four-Dimensional Human, online communication allows terminally ill patients to express, to larger audiences than ever before, their experiences of the dying process. And since the internet is a disembodied medium, they can engage in social interactions that are not foregrounded by their physical frailty. Online life provides them with a robust presence in the world, deep into their decline.

(Originally published on inthemargins.ca)