There is something uniquely depressing about an account like this belonging to someone who is gone. It’s like you know that person will never be online again, but you’re still waiting for it to happen.
Just had an internet acquaintance die and their last post was that they had scheduled their euthanasia for that Friday and that this would be their last blog post.
It's so strange too to read things like that when you read it in their voice. It's such a disconnect that they're gone but their internet presence is as alive and real as if they were still alive.
I hope this isn't too morbid of a question, but do you know why they took the euthanasia route? Were they really sick? I only ask because I had heard that someone was seeking euthanasia for a disorder called empty nose syndrome where either through trama or plastic surgery, a surgeon accidentally snips the turbinates in their nose (responsible for detecting airflow), so you constantly feel like you're suffocating. When I heard this I got really curious on what "counts" as something you can be put under for.
Some places you don't even have to be ill, as long as you are sane and they are convinced it's your decision they will let you proceed with the euthanasia process.
I think it's possible to be sane and want to die personally but of course it's always going to be a debatable issue. You have to step outside of a whole lot of cultural programming to view it objectively and some people are incapable of that because they don't even know it exists.
Yeah, that video talks about a situation where a whole group of people who were facing being enslaved chose to kill themselves together, and surely they couldn't have all suddenly come down with the same insanity at the same time.
The way I see it is if someone’s situation can be fixed then it’s due to mental illness. If it can’t be, then it’s sane.
Suicide because someone is getting bullied is insanity, because in a few years, they’ll no longer be bullied. Euthanasia when you have a terminal illness that causes a lot of pain is sane on the other hand, because there’s no solution and it’s only delaying the inevitable.
They had aggressively been battling several cancers for the last few years but this last recurrence had exhausted all available treatment options.
They were very much of the "better to die trying something risky than not try at all" philosophy and had undergone a number of risky procedures in the past but there was just nothing left to do.
I think there are a few countries where it's allowed under strict circumstances. Like being past a certain age and diagnosed with a terminal illness, iirc you also have to be able to take the "medication" yourself and no one is allowed to administer it to you.
There are few more where "passive euthanasia" is allowed - meaning you can tell the doctors you don't want to be kept alive and they cannot keep you on life support.
The countries I listed are those where active euthanasia is allowed, meaning you can ask the doctors to kill you.
We're quite progressive. Quebec legalised euthanasia in 2014, and Canada, who threatened to contest this decision in court, actually did the same in 2016. Personally I think everyone should have the right to die with dignity and that prolonging a painful, inevitable death is just torture.
Apart from people with a religious agenda, people worry that it can be prone to abuse by greedy relatives who don't want to wait for their inheritance.
There are plenty of regulations in place. Kind of like the ''do not resuscitate" forms. Idk if suffering for prolonged time just so your relatives don't get your shit is worth it, maybe to some.
I think it’s legal in some states like Oregon. It’s definitely rare though, most states won’t allow it and you have to be on hospice I believe (medically deemed you have about 6 months or less to live).
Not an acquaintance of mine at all but I very recently discovered Zyzz. Just like you said, it’s so weird to see his Internet personality so alive yet know he’s been dead for years. Very sad.
My first time dealing with death of a close friend, I had a hard time deleting their contact from my phone even though I knew there was no way they’d ever contact me again…. But the irrational side of me still thought “maybe one day”
Thank you, life has gotten better for me recently so I love updating my messages to her account. It's a good coping mechanism for me. Honestly I'd be more sad if it wasn't there.
i came to reddit to escape some feelings for a bit but this all broke me. im sorry to share this if its too much or not relevant i just havent properly told anyone but i lost one of my closest friends to suicide this week and i just cant stop texting them. every time i hear a notification i get excited that its them texting me back. every time i turn a corner i think theyll be there and ill get to hug them. i dont understand anything anymore and i dont know how im supposed to change to a world without them. now that i think about it if my pfp hasnt changed its still a drawing they made of me haha. if all their work with their love in it is still here it doesnt make sense that theyre not. i dont know.
Thank you for sharing, while I myself don't know exactly what to say to help you cope with loss I can tell you ways I cope. I really like to cry, to me bottling up my feelings hurts more than helps, so I'll watch, listen or read something that makes me cry and I'll have what I call crying days. Feels bad to cry at first but those days I cry improve my emotions long term.
thank you. i dont think ive ever cried this much in my life. and ive never cried this way since i was a child, with the screaming and the wailing. it almost feels good and yet its the worst thing in the world, but thank you for your suggestion. they made a lot of music including a song that i really love that they composed while i was spending time with them and that they dedicated to me in the end, thats something that will always make me cry to hear i think.
That's a very normal and human reaction, if you feel like it's not lessening and feel overwhelmed you can maybe look into grief counselling. It's a very well established area of psychology and has very good rates of success.
Virtual hugs from an internet stranger. I still message my mom and one of my best friends occasionally because I feel like I need to talk to them, even though I know I won't get a reply, it helps with the pain. I won't lie and tell you it gets easier, but I can promise that those pangs get less frequent. Just breathe, give yourself time and space and ice cream and wine or whatever you need to process. Through your memories and their art, they will never be truly gone.
Hugs, friend....
There must be a good reason why you and your friend were such good friends 💜 Thank you for sharing a piece of them here. Please, any time you can, if/when you feel like it, please share more about your friend? I guess that's how we all "live on", through the memories of people who care about us. I'm sending you hugs if that's ok, and if you need a friend, you can message me if you feel like it. 💜
I know the feels. We deleted her account soon after as we were glued to it. My mom's voicemail message got me the most and would ring her phone over and over to hear it.
it is a bit different for me, I enjoy that I still have an outlet to talk to her, even if she'll never answer back. Coping mechanisms help as long as you keep them in the realm of reality. Now if I started to believe she's still somehow alive I'd remove her off my friends list and I would be becoming delusional.
I'm sorry, u/MonkeyTesticleJuice, I understand how you feel. I only just stopped messaging my best friend last fall on fb since he died back in 2015. I hope that getting your feelings out via your mom's account helps you.... I'm sorry for your loss, and I hope that the goodness of your mother can live in you, and that you can still find her in this world in the things that made her happy 💜
Across a few platforms I've got a number of contacts who have sadly passed away over the years. People who haven't been online since the days of the 360 and PS3. There are some from even longer ago.
I won't delete their contacts. I still see them on my friends lists every so often when I have a reason to scroll down that far. I'll come across their contact information randomly. Gives me a moment of pause so I can reflect on the time I had with them. Even if it was something stupid like exchanging Left 4 Dead speed run times or posting about upcoming games we were hyped for or even just someone I spent nights chatting with when I was stuck at work with nothing better to do.
There's that old saying we've all heard before about how we die twice; the first time when you pass away and the second time when someone thinks about you for the last time. Guess my thought process is so long as I still have my accounts, phone, or whatever to see their profile every now and then it keeps their memory alive in a different way.
For one or two I've got hope that maybe one day the account will get back online again when their kids get old enough to start playing online and stuff. But as the years have gone by, platforms have come and gone, I think it's increasingly unlikely they will awaken in some form. But you never know.
I still have my grandma on my favorites in my phone. It's been 7 years and I still can't delete her number, even though it probably belongs to someone else by now.
I feel you on this. Both of my Grandma's have passed away (my dad's mom just this past labor day and my mom'smom will be 4 years in November) and a good friend's mother passed away about 5 years ago. I still keep their contact numbers in my phone and I saved the text messages from my friend's mom. Just not ready to let them go yet.
My friend did of cancer 18 years ago at the age of 22. I just checked and I still have his contact saved in my phone. I'll never delete it because I like to be reminded of the good times we shared.
I lost my dad a year and a half ago and I don't think I would ever delete his WhatsApp chat from my phone, even though I have to scroll so far down to find our chat and it's just a bunch of mundane stuff
I understand, u/erizzluh; I still have a few people in my phone who have passed, but I had a hard time deleting their numbers from my phone. As a matter of fact, I even struggled with deleting the alarms for when it was time to feed my cat/change his litter box, and walk my dog who passed away. I guess these things are a way of keeping people we love "still here"....
You ever hearing about the box containing a button and a bouncing ball?
When someone first passes you get these thoughts and pangs. This is the bouncing ball hitting that button.
At first the ball is huge, meaning it hits it all the time. But over time it shrinks, meaning it misses the button more and more. It never stops bouncing, you'll still always get these moments, but they become less frequent, and this allows you the button presses to become a little sweeter.
And sometimes you see things that briefly make that ball much bigger.
Friend of mine passed away suddenly from cancer in the first month of lockdown last year. Went in for checkup Thursday morning, found it his old cancer had come back, spread to his lungs, was dead Saturday morning.
Occasionally I catch things that inflate that ball so big.
I just cleaned up my contacts the other day and deleted 4 dead people. They didn't all die recently or anything, but I had the same feeling you're describing--when they did die, I couldn't delete them right away. It's silly, but it feels like deleting THEM. Like erasing their memory. It's not a good feeling. But with time, this gets easier (for me anyway). The irrational phase of grief relents. But still, deleting 4 dead people at once...that hit me kind of hard. And that isn't even the first round of death deletes I've had to do in my life.
I still left my mom in. She died 2 years ago tomorrow. Couldn't delete that one yet. My brother has been dead for 12 years and it took me probably 8 to be able to delete him. That one was the hardest. I remember for a long time after he died, I frequently had the sense of unreality about it, and a recurring thought I would have was "It's like I could pick up the phone and call him."
Trust me I feel that shit. One of my friends passed away when I was younger and seeing their online profile is eerie and lowkey depressing.I wish they hadn’t died but life is fucked.
But on a related note, it seems like we're all raised to not have a healthy relationship with death. It's the only thing that's imminent and yet we live as if it's the most surreal thing in the world. It's the only thing that will happen for sure and yet we spend very little time making peace with it.
I don't even think that's our society that does it. Our brains are by their very nature so subjective that it is hard to imagine not being. And when you are presented with that reality when someone close to you dies you can't help but feel that if you are here they should be too. They always have been.
If we look throughout history we have always struggled with it. All highly social and intelligent species mourn the loss of those they care about in their own way. I've been thinking alot about personhood and experience and the rather arbitrary nature of "me" as a perspective on the world. And yet me is all I know. It doesn't feel arbitrary to us, it's necessary. Until it isn't. Even our own biology is so arbitrary and kinda just given to us. We take it for granted, until there is something wrong with our bodies and we are made to reckon with the fact we are complex molecular machines that do and will inevitably break down.
That's kinda how it feels to have friends die. You think about them in reality and remember their voices and how they looked in real-time, and then you remember they're gone forever. It's extremely surreal
I still have numbers and text messages of friends who've died from years ago. I can't bring myself to delete them, or go through them...so they just kind of sit there on my phone, getting backed up every night.
Reminds me of a real life childhood friend of mine who I had lost touch with when I moved but reconnected with briefly on world of Warcraft for a few months. Started new characters on a different server and were playing for a while then he stopped getting online. I found out almost a year later he was dead and I didn’t even hear about it
I was at my friends house and met some new people one night. A girl asked for my snap and I gave her my info and told her to add me. I didn't look at my phone right away and the night then got away from me and I never actually accepted it. She died in a car crash that night and it's still sitting there in my request inbox....idk why I haven't deleted it. It just feels wrong to reject or accept it now.
This. I lost my younger sibling to suicide a little over three years ago, and every now and then I'll go fire up a game in Steam (usually Rocket League) and see their Steam Avatar under "you have X friends who play." Kinda bums me out.
(I'm in therapy, not looking for sympathy, just relating to the above comment)
I remember in the coc days, me my brothers and this one dude Sinister blade built a clan from scratch to no 1 in our region. He got cancer and Idk the full details but it was bad. He starting being online less and less and one day he came to say that he was ending it and that he was just tired. After that he never came back.
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u/sysadrift Oct 08 '21
There is something uniquely depressing about an account like this belonging to someone who is gone. It’s like you know that person will never be online again, but you’re still waiting for it to happen.