The Memorial Post Conundrum

Saying goodbye in the social media age

I messaged an old friend I hadn’t talked to in over a decade when I learned that David Lynch had passed away last week. I’ve known the person since freshman year of high school, and we started bonding after we both showed up for class wearing Operation Ivy t-shirts. His looked newer and store-bought, while I’d bartered for mine giving a friend’s older brother 10 dollars, my CD copy of Seaweed’s Weak, and a couple of old skateboard brand stickers. Looking back, we were both trying to define ourselves by being “different” from the other kids, back when dyeing your hair or listening to certain music could still get you branded a “freak” by your classmates. I think I was more interested in finding out about as much new stuff as I could, while my friend gravitated towards making a visual statement that usually confused and angered other people—he was the first person to teach me that you could put your hair into colorful liberty spikes using Kool-Aid and some paste—and it was obvious he loved the reaction. I respected him for that.

One of the things we were both interested in was Lynch. At that point, I wasn’t aware of just how obsessed people were with his work. I hadn’t seen The Elephant Man or Blue Velvet and had never heard the term “Lynchian.” I was vaguely familiar with Angelo Badalamenti’s score and Julee Cruise’s heavenly voice, but didn’t know either of their names; I’d seen jokes about “Who killed Laura Palmer” in a copy of Mad or Cracked, and had fallen asleep when I was 10 and my babysitter watched a copy of Wild at Heart we’d rented from the video store that was located in the local pharmacy. Even if I’d stayed awake for it, I wouldn’t have known or cared who the director was at the time. All I knew was I had very strong memories of catching bits of season 1 of Twin Peaks as a 9-year-old simply because it was on network TV before my bedtime, and television was the only thing my parents knew would pacify me. It was weird beyond comprehension, but there was something about the way it all made me feel that I was fascinated with understanding. My friend’s older sister was an art school student who had an Eraserhead t-shirt, and she explained to us the guy who’d made that film—which I lied about having seen when she asked because I had a crush on her—also made Twin Peaks. Fast-forward about a year or so, and my friend and I went in together—à la Bart Simpson and his friends with Radioactive Man #1—to purchase the Worldvision Home Video Twin Peaks VHS box set that for some reason didn’t include the pilot. It was still sealed and cost 30 bucks at a dusty, smokey book and movie store that an old hippie guy ran, a steep discount from its original $89.95 price tag when it was released just a few years earlier. It was summer and neither of us could drive, so we decided to spend about a week sitting in his basement that smelled like mold watching the show on a fuzzy little Zenith TV. The next summer, after we’d procured a bag of semi-decent weed, we decided to watch it again. The tradition lasted another year, and then my friend and I had a falling out as we inched towards adulthood. We drifted apart and the box set stayed at his home. We reconciled a few years later as we both verged on not having to use fake IDs to drink in bars anymore, but we were going in different directions and the friendship would never be like it was. Social media made it a little easier to seem like our hearts were still in it, but our 20s and 30s passed and today it’s obvious we took different paths towards our 40s. Today, our relationship is almost totally relegated to “Likes” and emoji comments, while our last DM was in 2015 when a mutual of ours died in a car crash. My message to him after news of Lynch’s passing was me asking if he still had the box set. He said it probably got tossed out in the trash years ago. I was about to click out of the app and go searching for a replacement (and also maybe a VHS player to watch the tapes with) when my old friend messaged me “You really take celebrity death seriously” adding a “Lol” after it.

I assume my friend who I haven’t had much communication with over the last few decades has seen me post on the occasions when somebody I respect dies. For Lynch, it only took a few minutes for me to put a picture of him on Instagram with a caption about how much he ended up shaping and changing my life, and I meant it—but I can see how opening an app and seeing one memorial post after another when a significant cultural figure passes can water down the experience and rob much personal feel from it.

Yesterday, I posted something on Instagram about the writer and illustrator Jules Feiffer’s passing. I’d read about it not long before seeing Garth Hudson had also passed on, meaning The Band was finally able to jam together in the great Big Pink basement in the sky, and thought about what a weird situation it put me in. Feiffer’s work has been with me in one way or another nearly my entire life; he was one of those artists who could create things that would have deep meaning for children and adults alike. Drawing the illustrations for The Phantom Tollbooth and writing the script for 1971’s Carnal Knowledge is the definition of range to me, and is why I put Feiffer in rare company alongside the likes of Shel Silverstein, Jim Henson, and Edward Gorey. All of them could create for kids and adults alike, but some of their best work appealed to people of all ages in a very fun, weird way. I put up an old picture of Feiffer, adding some stupid little caption that basically said how much I appreciated his work, then did something I rarely do and decided to delete the post. I thought about my old high school friend commenting on how serious I took people I only knew through their work passing away, and decided a dashed off Instagram post wasn’t the proper way to say thanks for influencing me.

I go back and forth on the online memorial post. It can feel like such a meaningless thing when everybody is putting the same photo online and adding a word or 500 about the dead, and it sometimes leaves me feeling like we all just want people to know we cared about the person. It becomes about us, the living, and not so much them, the deceased. You could, of course, not post anything at all. The world doesn’t need you (or me, in this case) weighing in on every damn thing. Nobody is sitting around going, “I wonder if Jason is going to post his thoughts on the passing of the guy who wrote the screenplay for the 1980 live action, Robert Altman-directed Popeye movie.” Not every event requires you to send out a press release or a post on X, but we all mourn in our own ways. The one thing the dial-up Internet of my youth and the one I’m always connected to these days have in common is it always reminded me I was far from the only fan out there. It’s comforting to remember that other people are also trying to work through the death of somebody they didn’t know personally, but whose existence meant something to them—it gives you new perspectives and different ways to look at the dead person’s contributions.

I don’t want a life and work I respect being turned into another piece of content, so my new personal rule of thumb is I have to consider how much thought I put into the post, and if I invest too much brain power, then maybe I shouldn’t share it with the world. I put a picture I have of Lynch in my phone’s vast photo library on my Instagram grid almost a minute after I’d heard the news, and the post was done almost purely out of emotion. Usually I caution against posting anything while you’re truly feeling, but in the case of memorializing on social media, it just feels more honest to me to do it right away and not overthink it. That way you also have more time to go, sit, and revisit some of the person’s work that made them so important to you in the first place instead of wasting too much more time on social media.