PDP (Public Displays of Pain)

by Janet Mackenzie Smith

The world generally agrees that anything more than momentary PDA goes against decorum, citing the public interest and the risk of distracting drivers or other operators of heavy machinery, etc. But, how should we feel about PDP, public displays of pain?

A high school acquaintance that I have never been close with but who happens to be a Facebook friend keeps posting status updates about her relationship. During high school, Sharon (not her real name) and I were on the swim team together. She was significantly better than I was, which did bother me. But, other than that, Sharon and I barely interacted in high school, and we have not interacted at all in the eight years since.

But, over the course of the past two years, I have been a close, albeit silent, observer of her life as she recounts it in status updates. I watch as she and her live-in paramour break up. I watch her weather the pain of dividing assets. I watch Sharon ask for Memphis apartment-hunting advice. Then, I see them reunite. And, I learn that the reason for the recent tumult is tragic.

Sharon’s beau is battling a rare type of cancer. He is wrongly presumed to be in remission. When he learns that it has returned with a vengeance and the only prognosis is imminent fatality, he breaks up with Sharon, citing other reasons, in order to save her from spending the next year of her life watching him die. But, once she’s found out, she doesn’t let him.

I watch as her status updates go from optimism about an experimental treatment to rushing to plan her wedding before her now-fiancé is too sick to enjoy the festivities. I note the early time stamp on her “Check In” at the hospital every day. I see their wedding photos. I am alerted to his death. I know her pain for the months succeeding the funeral. I hear her ruminate on the difficulties of going to work every day since his passing. I see her summon the courage to ponder only happy memories on the first of his birthdays that she will spend without him.

I shouldn’t be privy to any of this. But I am.

I don’t think often about death. Or if I do, it’s not in a spiritual way. (“Damn, I should really replace my carbon monoxide detector batteries because the cat is meowing crazily and he must be either warning of a gas leak or of an impending earthquake?”) In the months that Sharon is posting multiple times a day, I think of her more often than I think of my brother or my parents. Mostly because I imagine her situation and realize time and again that I would have no way of dealing.

I find that things often lodge in my mind when there is no obvious resolution. My mind cannot accept that there is something I cannot figure out if I commit to thinking about it from all angles. After all, this is a problem — how to deal with the death of someone so dear and so young — and I should be able to solve a problem.

Perhaps, absent a solution, coping mechanisms are the next best thing. Sharon’s coping mechanism is, in part, informing all of those even tangentially involved in her life of the daily details of her tragedy. I don’t know if this would be my way of coping, but there’s something bold and admirable in offering up endlessly challenging, prickly, and devastating facts in a forum known for its tedium.

I remember reading (or, pretending to read and secretly translating every word of) Lorca’s poetry in high school. My primary motivation for doing so was to impress people (“How sophisticated is that sophomore! Jeez, look at her with that Spanish poetry. She must be better than nearly everyone else!”), but some of its themes have stuck with me. Duende is a word I remember (and a concept I performatively claimed to understand). The substance of death, the earthly ephemeral remainder of those that have died, is in the air. Sometimes you feel it like wind whipping your hair into your face. Other times, it’s a barely perceptible breeze.

Some people criticize Americans for not living with death. We exile it. We sanitize it. So, PDP is beneficial? Duende should infect social media? Because there isn’t a solution to the above problem. But, the lack of a solution is a fact we should know well and confront regularly. Because to ignore such a fact is to not know ourselves or one another.

When Janet Mackenzie Smith was 15, she thought that she was the next Kant. Now, she is a paralegal with a superfluous master’s degree, $90K in student loans and an excess of bitterness. Her forthcoming book is called Generation Special, unless her agent renames it.