For years — first on Usenet, now even more easily with e-mail list services like YahooGroups, we’ve seen the proliferation of Internet support groups and communities. People united by nothing more than a common interest and a common language can meet, discuss, learn from each other, lean on each other, no matter how far apart they live. We get to know each other in an abbreviated fashion: we know the writing style, we know what subjects amuse and infuriate them, we understand the sense of humor. All this never hearing a voice or seeing a face or meeting in person.
Once, after my mother died, a woman I’d "known" from email for seven or eight years looked me up and called me on the phone. It was unexpected and such a strange sensation — the voice wasn’t right somehow. I’d "heard" her in my mind for so long. Her voice is pixels, a sig file and a wink 😉 at exactly the spot where I know it will go.
Our language hasn’t caught up with these relationships. Are these people friends? "Online friends?" Did we "hear" a rumor or read it? "I was saying just yesterday…" or typing? How long have we "known" them?
What happens to our sense of community and of empathy when we have close emotional ties, or think we do, to people we have never seen, touched, or heard — people we likely never will? It’s surely a challenge that our social natures have never really known.
This past week, a woman I have known through an internet email list for at least five years suffered a terrible personal tragedy — a childbirth went horribly wrong. Her baby died and she herself was near death; perhaps she will never bear another child. As the details came out, passed from computer to computer along a long chain that somewhere included a telephone and a human voice, I felt such a strong longing to do something.
Deep within all of us there is an urge to comfort the grieving. Grief cannot really be comforted with words, in my experience, although everyone wants to say something. So our primal instincts are to touch, to give, to be present. We do things like bring casseroles because we know it is so hard to remember to eat when the world seems to have stopped. We go to funerals and memorial services because we know that presence is something that comforts mourners. We reach out and touch hands. We come and mow the lawn. I remember my father-in-law washing the car for me before my mother’s funeral, so that it would look nice in the procession, and also he shined our black shoes. These physical things might not even be noticed in the midst of grief, but they will help, in real ways. And they are what we crave to give.
But if we are not friends "IRL," as they say (and isn’t it telling that Internet-only must mean… not your Real Life?), especially if some anonymity separates us (understandably), all we can offer is words, and words are pretty empty and sad little things in the yawning maw of grief.
People manage, anyway. A knot of supporters from one of the lists has started a Paypal fund to buy her a laptop she can use during her convalescence. Some of them are planning to drive or fly hundreds of miles to be with her at the funeral — they have decided to tear down the odd wall of Internet-only communities, entering into her real life.
I won’t be doing that, for a variety of reasons… but it does leave me with this strange sadness that has nowhere to go but here.
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