Letting go of someone I never knew

I had an oddly poignant experience on Twitter yesterday — I know, the last place you'd ever expect to encounter something poignant.

I was going through the list of people I follow and was removing those who are just trying to sell something, as well as  all the self-proclaimed "marketing gurus," "life coaches," and political pundits. Just part of the necessary pruning and cleaning one occasionally must do in the world of social media platforms. Nothing new there.

But in the midst of this utterly banal chore, I came to the Twitter profile of a young Catholic woman named Ginger, whose face I only vaguely remembered seeing before and whose posts I hadn't seen a quite awhile. Opening her profile, I saw that her last several posts were from mid 2009 and were about her rapid decline from lung cancer. One of them expressed how hard it was for her to deal with the shock of having been just diagnosed by her physician as "terminal." A few posts later, her comment stream just . . . ended.



Nothing more. 

I Googled her name and saw that she died that summer, not long after her last post, mourned, no doubt, by many grief-stricken family and friends. She was only 41.

This brought back the sad memory of another Catholic woman I knew quite well and very much admired — a vibrant and vital young wife and mother — who also died of lung cancer in September of that same year. A pang of melancholy rose up in me at that still painful remembrance.

Gazing at this lady's picture,  the mouse cursor poised over the "unfollow" button on my screen, I felt moved by the thought that, even though she had died some time ago and I would therefore never see any further posts from her, still . . . by pressing "unfollow," I would be, in a certain sense, letting go of her. It seemed strange that it should occur to me in that way — after all, I never knew her personally. I was only aware of her existence through Twitter. A dim, superficial awareness of someone, to be sure. But still, there had been the slightest of connections there, albeit nothing more than pixels on a screen.

In that moment, an image from the movie Titanic arose in my mind; the one in which Rose is lying on a piece of floating debris holding on with one hand to the now dead Jack, almost entirely submerged in the frigid water. As she lets go of his hand, he sinks slowly into oblivion. True, those two were illicit lovers, and in the case of this Twitter contact, well, she was no one I had ever even met before, much less knew personally. 

And yet, for a few brief, uncanny moments, my mind was pervaded by that poignant image of Rose letting go of Jack's hand. 

I pressed "unfollow," and in so doing said a kind of electronic "goodbye" to a sister in Christ I never knew, except through the medium of an ephemeral, tenuous, and seemingly insignificant collection of pixels on my computer screen. And then, I said a prayer for the repose of her soul.

How strange, it seems to me, and how perfectly fitting at the same time, that the Lord makes use of even something as casual and (seemingly) inconsequential as Twitter to remind the members of His Body of their connection to each other.

Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen. http://patrickmadrid.blogspot.com