An article about animal mummies in the latest National Geographic got me thinking about death and culture. There's nothing quite like death rituals to boil down the essence of a culture. The way we treat and honor the dead, the things we keep, the things we don't, the things we care to remember, the things we try desperately to forget--these all reflect basic human needs and basic cultural values.

And so it goes, in a world increasingly lived online, Facebook is becoming our digital graveyard:

Facebook is to give people the option to "memorialise" the profile pages of friends and relatives who have died.

The site invited family members to report when one of its users had died, to enable it to remove sensitive information such as updates and contacts.

Dido had a funeral pyre, Basho had a death poem, Farrah Fawcett had a television special. We prepare for death with the most familiar elements of how we lived our lives.

I remember getting chills when, a few years after a friend of mine died suddenly, I happened upon her old Facebook page. Like the abrupt ending of Anne Frank's diary, her profile was perfectly preserved in time, a snapshot of a life that would unexpectedly end a few days later. But unlike Anne Frank's diary, her Facebook page was just as active as ever. Friends could still post and chat to her as if she were still alive, with updates about their goings-on and "check-ins" on how she's doing in the afterlife.

I do wonder how her profile would look today, if she knew she was about to die. In the Zen poetic tradition, the jisei, or death poem, is a deep and honored practice, a final thought in a culture steeped in the way of poetry. I think back to Michael "Ohenrosan", a very kind Buddhist blogger, poet and photographer I met a few years back, shortly after he was diagnosed with cancer. His blog became an incredibly moving and powerful meditation on life, and he posted his own jisei a few days before the cancer took his life. But in some sense, the entire blog was a death poem, not just the final poem itself. It remains active today, with the torch carried on both by his family and his readership.

Might the memorialized Facebook profile become the 21st century jisei, a carefully-constructed and carefully-crafted digital epitaph? We are born online, we find love online, we grow up, we think, we live our lives online. It only makes sense, I think, that we are also finding ways to die online.

Labels: culture, internet, poetry, zen