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August 05, 2002
Y'dead, mon?
I never read Skattieboy's blog before today, and only today because Xkot had linked to him under the title "A Sad Loss".
Non sequitur: I get spam from one, Christine Hall, telling me that I could put www.xkot.net on the map if I subscribed to her services to put it on some search engines. Great. I wonder who's out there helping put me on the Internet map on my behalf.
Back to the topic of Skattieboy. If you had stopped to read any of the links above, you would have discovered that Skattieboy (a.k.a. Scott Vice) was found dead in his apartment last Monday. The funeral was this past weekend. I read about this first thing this morning and it had me fixated on my own mortality and the issue of discovery and propagation until lunch, when my thoughts were then displaced by an all-consuming urge to feed my face with kielbasa.
But for the morning, I was feeling pretty morbid and a little freaked out. The topic seems to come up from time to time and, like the Billy Crystal character in City Slickers, I fixate on the whole death thing for awhile, except without the sticking my hands in the womb of a cow part.
It struck me that Scott had been a vibrant individual, well on his way to earning a Ph.D. in Psychology and had been, up until very recently, talking about his relationship with the girl among other very typical daily life things. He had even apologized in late July for posting less due to his busy life.
And then, there was nothing.
A friend of his ribbed him about being lax in posting, two days after his last post.
Then his brother posts in one of his comment sections, a week after his last post, that Scott was discovered dead in his apartment the day before.
Reading the various responses was enlightening. First, there was the disbelief and denial ("please tell me you're joking") and then the outpouring of emotion and condolences as people struggled to get a grip on the impact that this announcement would have. In Scott's case, many of the people that posted to his blog were his personal friends from when he lives in Utah, but there were, too, quite a few that knew him solely through their interaction with him and his blog. My condolences to his friends and family, of course, but his passing led me to think of a few other things.
If I died unexpectedly tonight, who would know? Who would find out first and, from there, how would the rest of the world know?
I live alone, save for a pair of cats, and they haven't been receptive to my attempts to teach them how to dial 911 on my cellphone or manage saying anything more than "meow." My contact with friends here, face to face, is sporadic, as is my contact with family, whether by phone or by email. For them, it's not unusual to not hear from me on a weekly basis. I suspect that my workplace would find out first, when they discover that I am neither reporting to work nor telling them my whereabouts. So... figure it takes them a week before they decide to send someone to check on my apartment.
They have my next of kin, so my family would find out about as quickly as they find out at the office, but from there, I don't know how much further it would go. My college friends would probably find out, because my parents know some of them and might have their phone number. If they got their hands on my Palm Pilot, they'd get that stuff, too. I don't know if they'd go as far as to start calling random people on my Palm Pilot to tell them the news.
The kicker is that I have a lot of friends that I've made online, whether through the blog, or mailing lists, or MUSH/MUXes. I'd like those friends to know if I passed away, but I'm not sure that anyone would know what to do. My sister is aware of my blog, so she might think to post something on here about it. That would notify quite a few people, I guess. From there, I suppose it would propagate to the MU* and the other mailing lists... so maybe there's not much to worry about, as long as something gets posted up here.
So who knows anything about do-it-yourself will kits? I think the best way to take care of all of this is to just write down the instructions on how to post stuff around to let your online buddies know what happened to you, if you die.
Talk about a morbid Monday...
Posted by KinCross at August 5, 2002 08:25 PM