Facing The Third Phase Online

When I was a girl, I remember my parents reading the obit pages of The Hamilton Spectator to see if anyone they knew had died. I found the activity not only morbid but incomprehensible. Now, of course, I have friends who do the same thing. I don't read newspapers - in paper form - any more and don't go hunting on line for obits so I've lost the tradition of the generations before me who checked the mortality of their acquaintance and reaffirmed their own each day by scanning those pages.

In the past eighteen months, two women I have admired greatly have died - one quite suddenly. Emails circulated with the news but before that I'd learned the raw emotional details from family members who used their Facebook accounts.

One grieving husband announced his wife's death by messaging her friends on her account, and then responding to those who responded back with details of the funeral as they came together. It was an eerie feeling to log into Facebook and learn I had a message from my dead colleague.

I first joined Facebook for my work; I needed to keep up with the subjects of a book I was writing and they were all on Facebook. But when I left my place of employment after more than 20 years I came to learn its value on a personal level. Facebook became a way of checking in with people still working there or people, like me, who had left.

There's been debate about the term "friends," as it applies to Facebook. Do some people really have 332 "friends?" But for me, Facebook replaced the kind of friendly conversations I had in the workplace about where people were going on holidays, what movies they were seeing, how their children were doing. Those conversations made me feel that I belonged to a community. I might not dine or even go out for coffee with all I encountered in a day. But we shared a telling of our stories that made the workplace human. And I missed that terribly when I became a sessional instructor and a freelance writer. Facebook helped a lot.

I'm not alone in that feeling. As more of more of my former colleagues retire they suddenly become Facebook aficionados. That's perhaps why in late 2013,  Forbes magazine reported that seniors were the fastest growing group on Facebook. Any why there are Facebook for dummy books for seniors.

Grandparents love Facebook. Their photo status can command a much larger audience than the photo book stuffed in a purse.

Travels, new homes, second careers are all the stuff of Facebook postings by people in The Third Phase. For some, Facebook, becomes the promotional vehicle for their latest projects (guilty); for others it's a place to share an observation, a good article, a moment of joy in a good meal, a new garden flower (guilty) or a hack that's worked for them.

One thing I really came to appreciate about Facebook was how I was able to reconnect to people I'd lost over the years, often through my own neglect. In Toronto, a few years back I finally went to a reunion of women from my university residence and, after the event, linked to a few on Facebook. I came to exchange lively messages with a woman in B.C. whom I'd known well in my twenties. Pat Hibbits had become the vice-president of Simon Fraser University. And her Facebook posts were impressive; she gathered photos her friends had taken around the world and linked them to an album called "your views this morning." She reported on the long illness and death of her husband. She posted on sports, on politics, her children, food deals in Vancouver and the good or bad behavior of that city's citizens. And her private messages always showed an interest in my endeavours and the blogs Peter and I wrote. I felt I was rediscovering her vast intelligence and her caustic, grew-up-on-a-farm earthy wit.

So I was shocked to open Facebook one morning and discover a message posted by Pat's son. One of her children had found her collapsed and disoriented; doctors at the hospital discovered a brain tumor and operated the next day. Two days later her son posted that she had died.

I felt the same emptiness I felt when colleagues from work suddenly disappeared. Turning down a hallway where I might run into them, I'd feel the loss each time. Now when I sign into Facebook, I miss Pat's vivacious presence on the newsfeed.

Facebook has it critics and privacy is a concern. And, of course, it can never replace the pleasure of sitting and talking to flesh and blood friends. But I feel grateful that I came to know my old college friend again after all those years. It's fitting that her Facebook page is now a place for friends to remember her. I have her last message for that. A month before she died, she wrote to say she had read Peter's book on his mobility issues and to send her compliments; she described the pain of her own debilitating arthritis. She ended by saying: " I hope aging is very good to you and Peter."  D

Teaching an 'old dog' a 'new' trick

Waiting rooms everywhere are alike. It can be an emergency ward in a hospital, a visa office, a doctor's office, the closet off to the right in a garage, the ante-room to your lawyer's offices or even the Drive/Test Centre in downtown St. Catharine's. It is all the same. Old acoustic tiles in the ceiling, a number system that has lost any semblance of rationality to it (or any semblance that you can fathom), staff that are hostile, bored, abused or a toxic combo of all three and a whack of people who just want, need, to get out of this purgatory and back to life. And needless to say most of the people waiting are anxious. They are anxious because they fear that the end result of being in the waiting room will be bad news, a hefty bill, a serious disappointment or being told to come back the next day. And that's me on Thursday afternoon at the Drive/Test Centre located in a crummy little mall on Bunting Road in St. Catharine's.

I don`t drive. Well, I haven`t driven for about 30 years. I stopped driving for a whack of reasons, some practical, some psychological. But over the last few years it has become increasingly clear to me that not driving is actually very selfish. Why should others be at my beck and call and why should others not expect to be able to rely on me driving them to an appointment or heading out to do errands? Driving was becoming, had become a matter of simple basic fairness. So I committed to learning once again how to drive.

The first thing was of course passing a test to get a temporary licence in order to practise driving and them meant learning a whole bunch of rules that I might have known once and forgotten or never knew. Where should your car be if you are turning left from a one-way street to a two-way street? What does a very curvy line on a yellow sign indicate? How close can you park to a fire hydrant? And so on, and so on. Luckily there are on-line practice tests that I could train myself with and train I did. I did ok for the most part but every once in awhile I'd get thrown by a question about the penalty for some infraction was. If you didn't stop for a school bus, if you drove without a licence and so on. I would always get these wrong because I always opted for the more extreme answer and that was never right. Clearly, my sense of justice is at odds with that of the province of Ontario.

So I am sitting in this waiting room, waiting to take my test and I am really anxious. I am convinced that all these nervous teenagers sitting around me are going to ace this test and some officious bureaucrat is going to call out my name and announce loudly that I have failed and that I should go home and think about how stupid I am. (Now imagine what it portends that I am so nervous taking a written test...just think about when I actually have to get in the car with a driving examiner...one of us is going to need a Valium or two...and yes...I realize that according to rule 2.7.6 as a beginner drive I am not allowed to operate a motor vehicle while taking Valium.)

As Debi would say, of course I passed. I actually did quite well. Out of 40 questions I only got two wrong and one of the two was a trick question. Now all I have to do is learn once again how to actually drive a car. Updates to come, and no...you will never see a book with the title "The Man Who Learned How To Drive Twice". P.