Paying Respects
by Suzanne Strempek Shea
MARCH 22, 2010 TAGS:
Mail a card, send flowers, make a call, cook a casserole, attend the wake, sit at the service.
When my father died suddenly 17 years ago, depending on the level of connection, mourners did one or a few or all of the above. If he’d been a far-flung former co-worker, you sent a card. If he’d been the godfather who also was your best friend, you did everything, many times.
When my father-in-law died suddenly two months ago, I got a crash course in how nearly two decades of technological advances have birthed new ways to acknowledge a death and spread the word. I also stopped to ponder just what’s proper.
My first hint of a new era came that first day when I reached for the cell phone to tell a dear friend the news. But she’d already left me a message, having learned of the death just a few hours after it happened and from an ocean away. Someone in the States had relayed word via e-mail to friends in Ireland, my father-in-law’s birthplace.
Several e-mailed my friend to ask what she knew. And now she was phoning me to offer condolences.
Back in 1992, I sat on the floor by the regular old landline, working my way through the family phone book. Here in 2010, choruses of ringtones informed us of more messages and texts piling up. “We just heard,” said the callers. “We R with U,” read the lines.
I wrote my father-in-law’s obituary on my laptop, then opened my iPhoto albums to search among the thousands of images I’ve never printed.
The family and I worked on the best wording of the sentences, the just-right cropping of the headshot. And everything was e-mailed to the newspaper.
Seventeen years ago, I wrote my father’s obituary in pen, on a legal pad, at my parents’ kitchen table. My mother, husband and I drove it to the funeral home, along with a 5-by-7 photo I’d removed from a frame in my living room. Then the funeral director drove both items half an hour to the newsroom. The following morning, the newspaper with the page one photo of Windsor Castle ablaze carried my father’s obituary.
Two months ago, I opened my computer and called up the same paper’s obituary page. Dozens of other readers had done the
same thing, because dozens had clicked on the words “Visit Guest Book.” We read condolences from America, England, and Ireland, those telling us in my father-in-law’s first language some form of Is olc liom do bhris - they were sorry for our loss. No onionskin paper carried that message over the seas, as had been the case when my Polish relatives sent condolences
for my father’s loss. The response to the online obituary was as swift as those to the Facebook posting.
John T. “The Diamond” Shea never made it past the fourth grade. He never wanted to make it past the boundaries of the five-family village in which he was raised, but birth order meant that the eldest son, rather than he, got the farm. His only option was to emigrate.
He became a tiremaker and the father of seven. He never once drove a car. When he used the telephone, he spoke at a volume that made the wires unnecessary. His home security system was the house key on a shoelace tied to his belt loop. This is the simple and real man my husband and I featured on our Facebook pages: first the link to the obituary, then one to a column my columnist husband had written. Instantly, Facebook friends and their lovely sentiments popped up, person after person. A sort of electronic wake.
I wished all this clicking had been available in 1992. Because when a death makes your heart die a little, you want to tell everyone just who’s been lost. You want everyone to care. You want all the clocks to stop, as Auden perfectly put it, you want this great, sudden hole in your life to be acknowledged by the world.
With my father-in-law’s death, our circle of the world certainly did reach out. In a gesture that hadn’t changed since 1992, many friends sent plain old sympathy cards, but just as many turned to their keyboards because now we live online, where “So sorry” is one subject heading. “Just heard.” “What can I do?”
When it comes to paying respects, you can do so much more than in 1992, that’s for sure. But where do the most modern gestures rank in the old lineup? The bereaved now are faced with wondering whether a card bearing only a signature trumps an emotive e-mail. Whether a lengthy Skype conversation gets the caller off the hook for the wake and funeral. If that airmailed box of Omaha Steaks is as genuine a gesture as a homemade pie carried to the doorstep. If clicking that you “like” a Facebook link to an
obituary means … well, what does that mean?
Etiquette experts join us in scrambling for answers. The Emily Post Institute website says an e-mail can be used prior to writing a
condolence note, but should not replace it. Miss Manners even opposed sympathy cards: Use notepaper and your own words, please. Judith Martin writes in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior that “Letters of condolence should be written by hand, as should all letters of thanks from the bereaved.”
My husband and I have yet to write our letters of thanks, by hand or otherwise. But when we do, I doubt we’ll treasure the Hallmark cards any less than the printed messages from the online condolence book. Because one thing hasn’t changed since 1992, or even 1002: When somebody thinks of you in your time of need and makes an effort grand or small, it’s appreciated.
Whatever the manner of conveyance in a busy and ever-changing world, someone indeed stopped for a moment to acknowledge just who’s been lost.
Suzanne Strempek Shea is a regular contributor to Obit.
When my father died suddenly 17 years ago, depending on the level of connection, mourners did one or a few or all of the above. If he’d been a far-flung former co-worker, you sent a card. If he’d been the godfather who also was your best friend, you did everything, many times. When my father-in-law died suddenly two months ago, I got a crash course in how nearly two decades of technological advances have birthed new ways to acknowledge a death and spread the word. I also stopped to ponder just what’s proper.
My first hint of a new era came that first day when I reached for the cell phone to tell a dear friend the news. But she’d already left me a message, having learned of the death just a few hours after it happened and from an ocean away. Someone in the States had relayed word via e-mail to friends in Ireland, my father-in-law’s birthplace.
Several e-mailed my friend to ask what she knew. And now she was phoning me to offer condolences.
Back in 1992, I sat on the floor by the regular old landline, working my way through the family phone book. Here in 2010, choruses of ringtones informed us of more messages and texts piling up. “We just heard,” said the callers. “We R with U,” read the lines.
I wrote my father-in-law’s obituary on my laptop, then opened my iPhoto albums to search among the thousands of images I’ve never printed.
The family and I worked on the best wording of the sentences, the just-right cropping of the headshot. And everything was e-mailed to the newspaper.
Seventeen years ago, I wrote my father’s obituary in pen, on a legal pad, at my parents’ kitchen table. My mother, husband and I drove it to the funeral home, along with a 5-by-7 photo I’d removed from a frame in my living room. Then the funeral director drove both items half an hour to the newsroom. The following morning, the newspaper with the page one photo of Windsor Castle ablaze carried my father’s obituary.
Two months ago, I opened my computer and called up the same paper’s obituary page. Dozens of other readers had done the same thing, because dozens had clicked on the words “Visit Guest Book.” We read condolences from America, England, and Ireland, those telling us in my father-in-law’s first language some form of Is olc liom do bhris - they were sorry for our loss. No onionskin paper carried that message over the seas, as had been the case when my Polish relatives sent condolences
for my father’s loss. The response to the online obituary was as swift as those to the Facebook posting.
John T. “The Diamond” Shea never made it past the fourth grade. He never wanted to make it past the boundaries of the five-family village in which he was raised, but birth order meant that the eldest son, rather than he, got the farm. His only option was to emigrate.
He became a tiremaker and the father of seven. He never once drove a car. When he used the telephone, he spoke at a volume that made the wires unnecessary. His home security system was the house key on a shoelace tied to his belt loop. This is the simple and real man my husband and I featured on our Facebook pages: first the link to the obituary, then one to a column my columnist husband had written. Instantly, Facebook friends and their lovely sentiments popped up, person after person. A sort of electronic wake.
I wished all this clicking had been available in 1992. Because when a death makes your heart die a little, you want to tell everyone just who’s been lost. You want everyone to care. You want all the clocks to stop, as Auden perfectly put it, you want this great, sudden hole in your life to be acknowledged by the world.
With my father-in-law’s death, our circle of the world certainly did reach out. In a gesture that hadn’t changed since 1992, many friends sent plain old sympathy cards, but just as many turned to their keyboards because now we live online, where “So sorry” is one subject heading. “Just heard.” “What can I do?”
When it comes to paying respects, you can do so much more than in 1992, that’s for sure. But where do the most modern gestures rank in the old lineup? The bereaved now are faced with wondering whether a card bearing only a signature trumps an emotive e-mail. Whether a lengthy Skype conversation gets the caller off the hook for the wake and funeral. If that airmailed box of Omaha Steaks is as genuine a gesture as a homemade pie carried to the doorstep. If clicking that you “like” a Facebook link to an
obituary means … well, what does that mean?
Etiquette experts join us in scrambling for answers. The Emily Post Institute website says an e-mail can be used prior to writing a condolence note, but should not replace it. Miss Manners even opposed sympathy cards: Use notepaper and your own words, please. Judith Martin writes in Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior that “Letters of condolence should be written by hand, as should all letters of thanks from the bereaved.”
My husband and I have yet to write our letters of thanks, by hand or otherwise. But when we do, I doubt we’ll treasure the Hallmark cards any less than the printed messages from the online condolence book. Because one thing hasn’t changed since 1992, or even 1002: When somebody thinks of you in your time of need and makes an effort grand or small, it’s appreciated.
Whatever the manner of conveyance in a busy and ever-changing world, someone indeed stopped for a moment to acknowledge just who’s been lost.
Suzanne Strempek Shea is a regular contributor to Obit.
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