The Click and the Dead

Certain kinds of information seem impossible to encounter at the speed they actually arrive. The Google search engine offers them with the same mechanical composure whether it is providing the operating hours of the nearest Canadian Tire store or informing you that someone who once occupied the emotional centre of your life has tripped the light fantastic. The medium has no concept of proportion. It has only retrieval.

So you type a name almost absentmindedly. Or perhaps not absentmindedly. Maybe you had a vague premonition that something was up. Or perhaps after months of resisting, the impulse was irresistible because there is something vaguely embarrassing about wondering what has become of someone you deliberately untangled yourself from.

Curiosity, after enough time, begins disguising itself as administrative housekeeping. You tell yourself you’re merely checking. You could stop after the first result.

The first result is an obituary.

Not recent enough to feel like breaking news. Not old enough to have become history. Four months old.

Four months is a strangely accusatory unit of time. It is long enough that the people who loved them have already endured the first impossible phone call, the funeral, the paperwork, the casseroles, the awkward return to work, the birthdays that arrived anyway.

Long enough for photographs to have been selected and captions written in the past tense. Long enough for strangers to have stopped saying “I’m so sorry for your loss” every day. Or “he/she/they is in a better place.” Like anyone knows.

But also long enough for you to realize that for one-third of a year you have inhabited a universe in which this person did not exist, and you were the last to know.

Or maybe not the last. One of an unknowable number of peripheral figures who once mattered enormously and now belong to no notification list. There is no algorithm for former intimacy. The social software of adulthood has elaborate procedures for spouses, siblings, employers, neighbours. It has almost none for the people who once knew the exact cadence of your breathing at three in the morning or the sports teams you supported or the politicians you loathed … and now occupy no official category whatsoever.

The obituary itself performs an odd compression. It transforms the private complexity of an entire human being into a format that appears capable of being printed beside advertisements for lawn services. It contains the usual architecture: survived by, predeceased by, remembered for.

Sometimes there is an anecdote that seems almost comically insufficient. They loved their dogs and gardening. They fought a courageous fight against whatever killed them. They were unbeatable at Scrabble.

You stare at these phrases with the irrational certainty that they cannot possibly describe the same person who once cried because a particular song happened to come on while driving through rain, or who insisted on eating cereal from a coffee mug because bowls somehow made the milk too cold.

You begin searching for impossible confirmation.

Maybe it’s someone else.

Maybe the middle initial is different.

Maybe there were two people with that name who attended the same university, lived in the same city, worked in the same profession. Were born on the same day.

But the accompanying photograph removes all procedural doubt.

It is unmistakably them — however wrinkled or thinner or bloated — older by precisely the number of years you have not been paying attention.

There is an especially modern loneliness in discovering a death through an interface optimized for efficiency. No voice prepares you. No pause exists between question and answer. The page simply loads and portions of your past that you haven’t thought about for years are suddenly stuck on Playback, particularly around 4 a.m. with a grainy, wavering version of that obit photo staring back from the ceiling.

Grandma, what dead eyes you have.

Then begins the peculiar accounting that follows any irreversible news. Not guilt, exactly. Guilt presumes obligation. Numbness. Detachment. Insensibility.

Not apathy, exactly. Nor indifference. More a protective cocoon of dull impassivity wrought by time and distance and experience. This is something more structurally confusing. Almost a species of anesthesia.

You remember the last conversation.

You wonder if it deserved to become the last conversation. Whether it should have ended on a more conciliatory note.

You remember arguments that now seem to have been conducted on behalf of Middle Eastern civilizations that no longer exist. Entire emotional empires collapsed into details whose significance evaporated the instant mortality entered the room.

The brain performs this conversion with astonishing speed. Things that occupied months suddenly become footnotes. Other things — an inside joke, a shared train ride, a pork chop recipe — expand until they seem to constitute the entire relationship.

Memory edits according to rules that would fail every respectable standard of evidence.

The strange thing is that the person who has died is not the person you are mourning in this phlegmatic fashion. That person disappeared years earlier, dissolved gradually into separate routines, separate residences, separate circles of acquaintances.

The person who died four months ago had continued living an entire second life beyond your jurisdiction. They accumulated favourite restaurants you never visited, friends whose names mean nothing to you, lovers and children, illnesses, triumphs, disappointments and habits that would have startled the version of you who once believed you knew them completely.

You lament, then, not only a person but the permanent foreclosure of possibility. Not the possibility of reunion. That was a fantasy wearing nostalgia’s clothing. It was never going to happen anyway.

But what is lost irrevocably now is the possibility of accidental recognition.

Running into each other at a bookstore. A polite conversation that unexpectedly becomes genuine. The reassurance that another witness to your younger self remains somewhere in circulation. The wistful Paul Simon reminiscence scenario that will now never come to pass:

I met my old lover on the street last night She seemed so glad to see me, I just smiled And we talked about some old times, and we drank ourselves some beers Still crazy after all these years Oh, still crazy after all these years

That one’s off the books forever. Death eliminates all future revisions. Whatever your relationship had become — or failed to become — has entered its final draft.

The browser window remains absurdly ordinary throughout all of this. Other tabs wait patiently. The search bar invites another query. Two doors down, someone is comparing insurance rates or looking up banana bread recipes. The machinery continues its serene indifference, maybe the most unsettling feature of all. Reality does not pause to acknowledge the emotional disproportion between its contents.

You close the tab. You go to bed. Cling to your partner if you have one, long and hard. Nothing visible changes. The room remains exactly the same room it was six minutes earlier.

And yet an invisible population has shifted. The world now contains one fewer person who remembers you as the version of yourself that existed only with them. That particular edition has lost one of its readers.

It is tempting to imagine that this diminishes you in some measurable way, and maybe it does. Or perhaps what disappears is not identity but corroboration. We spend so much of life believing that our past survives because other people continue carrying compatible fragments of it. Every death quietly reduces the archive.

What remains, after the initial shock and the odd embarrassment of having learned this from a search engine instead of another human being, is an awareness that intimacy has a longer half-life than we admit.

Love may end. Marriage may end. Communication may end. But there remains, indefinitely, the unsettling fact that another consciousness once contained a detailed map of your existence.

Then one day, without ceremony, that consciousness is gone.

You remember their birthday. The date of the marriage, if there was one. Signing the divorce papers, if there were some.

The databases continue producing answers with perfect confidence. But one more person — someone who was once important in your life and who could have corrected your memory — is no longer available to do so.

Wasn’t going to happen anyway.

But still.