3 days ago
The Strange Rise of the Before-and-After Tragedy Meme
Once or twice each year, while deleting old voice mail messages, I take a moment to listen to one I'll never get rid of: a Christmas greeting from an uncle who died just months later. Hearing his voice brightens my day, though it can also set me on a melancholic path. If not for my first bout of Covid-19, I would have been spending Christmas with him that year. Instead, I put off my trip; we never saw each other again, and never will.
We now depend so much on technology that it has made our favorite devices and platforms, and the traces we leave on them, an unavoidable part of how we experience death. There was a time when the archive of an ordinary person's living years — the ephemera we would keep to remember them by — might have included just a few postcards and letters. Then came photographs and home videos. Then email exchanges and phone messages. Eventually social media platforms would make some of those traces public ones, trails of posts on zombie accounts that go on living long after their maker has ceased logging in. But even these had their own halo of privacy: Most would hold little significance to anyone who didn't know the departed and feel moved to retrace their digital footprints.
A few months ago, though, it occurred to me that something had shifted. Whatever idle time I spent on TikTok or Instagram, I realized, was being haunted by an unsettling new meme format. A representative post might feature something like a video of a young man diving from a cliff, jumping on a trampoline or lifting weights, or maybe a still photograph of a young woman sunbathing on a beach, or two children playing. If music had been added, it would be either very somber or very upbeat, emphasizing the joy of the moment or the painful aftermath that was about to be revealed. The explication of that pain always took the form of a blunt bit of text sitting atop the image:
'She doesn't know it yet but this will be her last video with her little sister.'
'Laughing because I thought he was incredibly uncoordinated in this move, not because he was 2 months away from a terminal diagnosis.'
'He doesn't know it yet, but he will become completely paralyzed in less than 3 hours. This will be his last morning stretch.'
There is no way to share grief without seeking someone's attention.
My initial reaction was probably not what the posters of such memes had in mind. At first, the videos struck me as trite, even morbid — desperate dispatches from a generation incapable of tamping down its urge to post through every last one of life's twists and turns. This less-than-charitable reading probably had a lot to do with the clash, in these videos, between the medium and the message — the gulf between the visual language of TikTok memes, which are so often trivial or silly, and the kind of life-altering tragedies they were being used to capture.
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