Thursday, August 06, 2009

on death, dying, underwear, and socks

Happy 40th anniversary to “ON DEATH AND DYING” by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and her five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

In this Internet age with cyberspace immortality, I am beginning to wonder about ‘acceptance’.

Deaths send the media scrambling to Facebook and MySpace to browse for sensational tidbits from the deceased and ‘friends’. Your words, rants, and pictures are forever.

How do families even access journals or social networks if they do not know the passwords? How do they note that someone is dead!

What is with posting comments on dead people’s pages?

Why do ‘friends’ still invite the dead to join Mafia Wars?

What is proper etiquette? Tweet, email, or post an entry to notify friends of a death.

Ahhh! The problems of cyber-immortality.

Of course, we caregivers have to assume 'real' immortality or at least the methuselah gene, too much depends on us waking each moring. We've been in denial too long to ever evolve.

How many accounts from banking, to credit cards, to bills will require someone to know your passwords to access those accounts? … and oh yes, they may read all your old email.

Somewhere I remember an admonition from my Mom about always wearing clean underwear and matching socks because you never know when you are going to die.

Amazing how that seems to make more sense each day.

Is this the future, keyboards instead of ouija boards?

Caregivingly Yours, Patrick Leer
web site: http://caregivinglyyours.com/
videos: http://www.youtube.com/daddyleer
musings: Patrick Ponders ...

2 comments:

  1. I hear you. Part of my to be opened in the event of my death papers are all my passwords to paypal, my journals, my ebay, etc...... And when I had my shop on-line they had instructions on how to close that. It definately gets more complicated.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I was thinking about just this the past week; I do ALL our business and most of it is online with various passwords etc. I thought this week I need to write it all down and give it to hubby just in case. life was much similar before we became paperless

    enjoy the day :)

    betty

    ReplyDelete

Blog Archive