Suicide on Facebook

Tonight I found out that a distant friend of mine from college committed suicide a few days ago, only a couple of days after his fiancee had broken up with him. The entire sequence of events is chronicled as wall posts on his Facebook profile, from the change in relationship status from “Engaged” to “Single” to the in memorium posts from his friends following his death. In between there were a couple of posts from the man himself that ranged from “heart-broken” to “doing better” to “not-so-good, but ok”.

The strangeness of the series lies in the queer continuity of comments throughout the time period, viewed in reverse chronological order to a point even before his breakup. When read together they have the character of a sort of superficial fondness or appreciation for the person: “missing you”, “I’m way crazier than you!”, “love you”, “miss you greatly!”, and so on. The strange thing is, the posts before the breakup, after the breakup, and after his death all pretty much have the same tone: a smiling face inside a square accompanied by a generic expression of care. In fact, it took a bit of combing through the page to even find the moment when he actually passed from living to dead.

The photos of him on his profile - suggestive of an effeminate-looking, coffeehouse type - betray the person I knew at Ole Miss fourteen years ago. This young man agonized over his sexuality and tortured his body through hormone treatments and self- and assisted-mutilations, none of which ever brought him any kind of symbiosis with himself and the world in which he lived. But there was an accessibility, too, to his problems and to our own: not open to the world but to his little network of friends, which I had the good fortune of being in for a brief time. In the end, it seemed that none of those 97 loving, caring friends of his on Facebook were close enough to pull him out of his blackness at a time when one live person might have been enough to keep him from drowning. Following the breakup I imagine he must have felt himself turned away from a place of being in the world - of love - to return to a state of utter abjection: a condition smeared throughout his childhood life, as I understand it from another friend.

…

There is no dimension for depth in the world of Facebook; only horizontality is allowed. Depth doesn’t matter and no one understands it anymore, anyway. And in our search for it - a quest that is, ironically, becoming harder to do in an era of free information - we drive ourselves mad with the expectation of meaningful connection when, in reality, there are only uplifting words and smiling faces available to mirror our sorrow.