Kate Holden Rocks This World

Amid ghostly remnants of loved ones and famous strangers, the grieving find a way to go on, writes Kate Holden.

WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN, EVEN BEYOND THE CYBER?

Roland Barthes once wrote of ‘that terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead’. It is a sombre subject, but as always there have been some terrible deaths lately, and they have made me think about how we respond to death in the age of electronic media, where the image of the deceased can be distributed worldwide in seconds, where a person can almost become more alive and certainly more present in death online than they ever were in life.

Someone dies: we are bereaved. If it is a private, regular person, there is a funeral or memorial service and the long grind of grieving. If it is a celerity ,we set about purchasing our memorials. In both, there is some kind of recuperation going on: a private ceremony such as a funeral takes stock of a person’s biography, personality accomplishments; there is often a photo displayed near the casket, or a slideshow; we retell anecdotes to capture the essence of the person. When it is that of a celebrity such as Michael Jackson, we can’t be there in person, we consume. We consume their products [I would have thought that fans already had his albums, but stores sold out within minutes the day after his death],we share photos and YouTube films and commemorative geegaws, we add to our collections: we acquire memory in concrete form. When in mythology the Egyptian god Osiris was murdered, his wife Isis went about the country collecting the dismembered pieces of his body and reassembling them to revive him; when a modern idol dies, we fragment him in numerable web pages, images, commentary pieces, prurient news reports; the static and moving images of a public figure become a kind of spectre. It is only 200 years since we have been able to do this with photographs, to keep an exact image [not a painting, not a sculpture] of one who has died. It is eerie, the way a dead person can now keep moving for years once they are physically gone.

Many societies have collected ancestral totems to remember the dead; the ancient Romans would keep wax masks of their forebears, and a t funerals, pay actors to wear them in the procession, enacting remembered behaviours of the dead person, reanimating them so they walked again behind their descendent. Medieval knights and kings lie still in stone effigies on countless marble slabs in European churches, their hands clasped, their little feet in slippers against a stone model of a beloved dog. But we have so much more technology to keep the dead animated.

We have our rituals ready-made: within hours of a teenage death on a road, friends arrive for what is a horribly frequent rite of passage for young people, the laying of flowers and framed photographs and affectionate messages. Victims of disasters have their photos arranged in thumbnails in newspaper pages, or the inevitable smiling; casual party snap is broadcast on television.
The terrible return of the oblivious victim, unaware that photos taken cheerfully one day will another day, become the fixed image of trauma. I think of the first Victorian fatality of swine flu, his name released without his family’s permission-or his own- and the strange violation that happens when a private person’s passing becomes a public event. We lose agency in our deaths, we are no longer our own. For my part, this is distressing; but what might be appalling as a prospect for an individual contemplating her own fate may be consolation for those left behind as they gather images, reminiscences, and reassurance that death does not mean obliteration.

Facebook and other social networking sites and blogs are facing the problem of deceased pages: the millions of sites left behind when members die. Many have a policy of removing the site if requested by a next of kin, but there are untold pages, password-locked and left the way they were at last posting, now a memorial site, for friends to leave messages, or awkwardly evoking an interrupted narrative, as humanly dishevelled, informal, and ingenuous as we are in life. The internet is full of these ghosts; both a comfort and a haunting.

Every death is dreadful. Our instinct, as survivors, is to hold on, to commemorate, consolidate memory with rituals and mementoes, to clutch at what we have left and attempt the impossible: to amass a person’s life in all its variety through a handful of images and products. The awful thing is that death precisely obviates all of this; we cannot recreate a life passed. Not even electronic archives can replace a living face and the invisible consciousness behind it. We make memorials out of memory, but a memento mori is for us, not those we miss.