Ghosts in the Machine

There are memories of people we have loved and lost all around us. Especially in cyberspace. Keith dots the digital landscape just beyond my keyboard. Just google him – Facebook, EBay, LinkedIn, even his obituaries sit like ghosts in the machine. Imagine how hard it is for me to close them down – all those bites and gigabytes echo off the walls of my little office, in the dark, filling me with memories. Words typed by his own hands and photos he took with his cell phone swirl around in the cloud and stopping them feels akin to watching him die all over again.

But to let them go on is a lie. To drag out his EBay business as sales fall just because I can’t bear to see it end isn’t fiscally responsible. Watching people send requests to connect on LinkedIn is bad business. The hardest of all is Facebook. This became painfully obvious tonight when I chose to log into his account to check on things. Once there, I stumbled on 4 friend requests all from people I had recently met at a party. I had friended them, they saw that I was married to Keith and they naturally wanted to friend him too, never knowing that he no longer was in a friending status.

Sometimes, it takes something like this for me to realize that I still am precariously tethered to the fear that if I erase, delete, reboot, that all I remember of Keith, all that I hold dear about him will slip away from me. I won’t remember the smirk, the way he’d place a hand on one hip and lean into it, the way he smelled like dial soap, wiggle his eyebrows in moments of mischief, and would fuss at me if I played with his few remaining hairs. But it isn’t fair to either of us to keep him on cyber life support so I have started to take action.

I’m starting to shut down EBay. I’m starting to sell our surplus – well – everything to friends, on Craigslist or just giving it away. Tonight, I’ve filed to have his Facebook profile memorialized. I’ve changed my status to widowed. It still feels like I’m standing there by his cyber bed, holding the cyber plug in my hand. He existed for so much of his life in front of computers that there will never come a time when all the ghosts in the machine will be exercised. I like that thought enough to let it stay my fear of hitting delete.