-Michael Jackson 2012: 175

How many dead people do you know on Facebook? I know three. Well, maybe two because one was aware that she was dying and took her page down. For the others, death was a surprise, even though in one case it was planned. Plans can be surprises of sorts.

Many people worry that social media is changing the world for the worse. It is pretty common to hear people lament the lack of face to face communication these days or worry that people are ‘disconnected’ in the age of digital connection. I don’t worry about this. If the undergraduate students I teach have shown me anything, it is that the medium of communication doesn’t over determine its purpose or possibility. Plus, I am a linguistic anthropologist and a human being so I know face to face interaction isn’t a connective walk-in-the-park. One thing I have been dwelling on is how social media alters how we know death.

Two months ago, I saw on twitter that a friend/mentor/colleague died. JJ was the first professor I was a teaching assistant for. We are not far apart in age as she was a veritable academic superstar and I arrived late to the PhD party. She told me early on in the term she had cancer as we walked out of an exam carrying armfuls of Scranton sheets. She was as thoughtful a teacher as she was a thinker and writer. I find myself channelling her when I’m explaining Saussurian linguistics.

The last time I saw JJ was two or three years ago. We were beside each other at a conference. She raised her hand to engage the panel (whose theme I forget) by telling a story about a coyote in her neighbourhood and a string of missing cats, including a three-legged cat she and her partner named Tripod. She said something to the effect that while we might know in the abstract that the coyote and Tripod’s disappearance were connected, we certainly would not want to know this relationship intimately. We purposefully hold things apart. This allows us to love even what may be gone. Like Tripod the cat.

I was angry that she died. I was angry I saw it on Twitter. Tweets don’t hedge. There are no “Are you sitting downs?” or “I have some bad news’”. There are none of the stock phrases that prepare you for imminent pain. The specter of doubt also seems greater when the news of death is sandwiched between hashtags, humble brags and stories about dress colours as optical illusions.

My friend/mentor/colleague AA also died this year. Facebook told me. Someone tagged him in a photo and wrote that they would miss him. His account is still up and sometimes he crosses someone’s mind and they will write to him or about him and their message will show up in my feed as if AA has posted it himself.

AA was a quiet ringleader of a group of grumpy Marxist anthropologists I have hung out with for many years. They like to get together to drink scotch, smoke American Spirit cigarettes and lament  the US economy.  Like me, AA studied mining. AA always made me feel like my ideas were good ones, even if they strayed from Classical Marxist Thought. AA’s grumpy political rants stood in stark contrast to his frequent, sentimental photo uploads to Facebook which chronicled the many birds of his backyard. He had elaborate feeders set out to draw in fowl from far and wide.

In times of distress like the loss of two very wonderful anthropologists, I turn to the insights of Buddhist teacher Micheal Stone. Micheal knows a lot of philosophy and practices from East and West. He has published many books including conversations with French feminist-theorist Luce Irigaray. Since finding his work, I’ve become a devout podcast Buddhist. Feeling the weight of the news of JJ’s and AA’s deaths, I cleaned my kitchen while listening to a talk titled, “Save a Ghost”. In it, Michael says “when we lose someone, all the other losses in our lives pile up”. He also says that our personality is constructed by how we mourn and that mindfulness is the ability to mourn. Micheal isn’t big into the McMindfulness sweeping corporate America. He says that we need to be intimate with what’s happening, but at the same time we need to not hold onto it, like how JJ was with Tripod and AA with his birds. “As we mourn the dead, the dead are alive in us making culture” Michael says. Anthropologists fight a lot about what culture is and isn’t. For some time I had to give up on my commitments in the culture debates and side with Micheal. Social media brings the intimacy of pain and loss. Hurt piles up. News feeds refresh. We can’t hold on.

Getting to know people across the barriers of language, culture, and generations provides one of the greatest joys of ethnographic fieldwork. I dislike the term “informant” because of its negative connotations, especially in the postsocialist context where people once “informed” on each other to the secret police. I prefer the term “fieldwork friends.”

I’ve conducted ethnographic research in Southeastern Europe for eighteen years, and I recognize the difficult power imbalances and the hierarchy of privileges that underpin relationships in the field. My position as an American – first as graduate student, then as professor – provides certain advantages that my fieldwork friends lack. Despite these challenges, I’ve forged close relations with many Bulgarian men and women who’ve shared their lives with me over the years.

In 2010, my ethnographic research took a historical turn, and I began a series of extended interviews with Bulgarian women who once worked for the state socialist-era Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement. When I began these interviews five years ago, the youngest woman was 67-years-old and the oldest was 90. I understood that these fieldwork friends would not be around for decades into the future. I weathered the stroke of one eighty-year old (who eventually recovered), but I felt a deep, immobilizing sorrow when I learned, ten days ago, of the sudden death of the youngest, a woman named Ana.

I arrived in Sofia on the 20th of December 2014, and spent Tuesday the 23rd at Ana’s flat, chatting about politics and films and plans for the winter holidays. Ana had been ill for about a month, but she’d recovered and exuded life and energy when we met. We sat for hours swapping stories about my travails as a working mother and her memories of life as a translator and international women’s activist during the Cold War. Ana regaled me with personal stories about Vilma Espin de Castro and Hortensia Bussi de Allende. She spoke English, German, and Russian fluently in addition to her native Bulgarian. “A human isn’t a human unless he has read at least two volumes of Dostoyevsky,” she told me. Ana devoured books like a hungry basset hound devours unguarded meatballs.

We parted with hugs and kisses, and agreed that I would return on Saturday. I intended to call her on Friday to confirm the time, but the hour grew late and I decided to ring first thing the next morning.

My mobile phone woke me instead. The caller’s number appeared on the screen, but it was unfamiliar.

“Halo?” I said, rubbing my eyes.

“I am sorry for calling you so early,” a voice said in Bulgarian. “But I know you had an appointment with my mother today, and I am calling to tell you that she can’t make it.” A long pause. “Last night, she died.”

The Bulgarian word “pochina” rang in my ears. “Who is this?” I said in Bulgarian. “Who died?”

“It’s Dolly,” the voice said. “My mother. My mother died. Last night.”

The sleep fog cleared. “Oh my god.”

“She called me last night while my husband and I were out around Sofia. She said she didn’t feel well. We went back home, but it was too late. She was alive when we arrived, but ten minutes later she died. A heart attack.”

I tried to match the information I heard with the image of Ana from Tuesday, comfortable and relaxed in her wine-colored velour track suit, telling me of her plan to reread all ten volumes of Dostoyevsky in the new year.

Dolly took my silence for confusion. “My mother won’t be able to keep her appointment.”

Later, Dolly called me again with details about the funeral. “Please come,” she told me, “She was cooking for you when she passed. I think she would want you to be there.”

The following day I stood in Sveti Sedmochislenitsi church, holding a candle with dozens of other mourners, as pallbearers bore Ana in an open casket. They placed her under the intricately carved iconostasis where the golden icons of Hristos Pantokrator and Sveta Bogoroditsa gazed down upon her pale face. Three baritone Bulgarian Orthodox priests chanted a funerary liturgy accompanied by a choir of tenors and mezzo-sopranos. Frankincense wafted from a swinging censer. When the time came, the mourners walked passed the body, laying flowers down at Ana’s feet.

In the Bulgarian Orthodox cosmology, the spirit of the deceased lingers for forty days after the death of the body. During this time the person remains near to the loved ones she left behind. Ana was still with us.

As I waited in line, the ambiguity of my presence at the funeral perplexed me. What was I doing among Ana’s close family, neighbors, and former colleagues? The only non-Bulgarian in the congregation, was I a social scientist or a friend? If Ana hovered somewhere watching, what did she want me to be? Our lives touched because of my research, but we also made a connection on the personal level of shared interests and favorite books.

When it came time to pay my final respects, I didn’t know what to think or say. I placed my warm hand upon her cold one. Tears flooded my eyes as I realized how much I would miss her. Maybe that’s all that mattered in the end. For that moment, I forgot I was an ethnographer and felt myself a simple human being. I wished Ana peace, and hoped the library in Heaven had all ten volumes of Dostoyevsky.