HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
THE VIRTUAL CEMETERY
leave ‘happy birthday’ messages. I
would send them his obit notice,”
says Podell, who was with Herr for
34 years. “I don’t know how real
[Facebook] is. How much do you
know about a person? Ultimately,
it can be silly because you don’t.”
She looks at his Facebook wall
about once a month. She reads
through the messages friends leave
for him — and still notifies the occasional visitor who thinks he’s
alive. But she keeps her deepest
thoughts about him private.
“I see people whose husbands
are ill and the wives are playing
out the whole scenario online. I
just think you can overshare things
sometimes. People’s lives, maybe
their deaths, shouldn’t play out
like that,” Podell says. “But on the
other hand, I think, who will be remembered? A couple of presidents.
Some poets. And who will remember you? Kids if you are just a normal schmoe. And if you’re lucky
enough to see them, grandchildren.
But that’s it.”
Podell says she has “a million
memories” of her husband around
her apartment. She can see his
photos and his old letters anytime.
Their daughter is 24, and they
reminisce over the good times:
Herr’s obsession with red wine
(he ran a wine blog), his 80-person Thanksgiving parties and his
painstakingly cultivated backyard
garden. But Podell finds herself going back to Facebook.
She looks over Herr’s old Facebook photos, like the black-andwhite one of him dipping his
daughter on the dancefloor, and
the one of him smiling, running his
fingers through his hair while driving on a racetrack, one of his favorite hobbies. Known for his spontaneity, he once took her hand and
serenaded her as they danced along
a street during a visit to Los Angeles. A friend had snapped a photo
and Podell recently made that her
Facebook profile picture.
When she dies, she’s not sure
if she wants the same kind of activity on her own Facebook. But
as much as it irks her to see some
people pretend to know her husband when they didn’t, remembrances posted by others have
touched her heart.
“Maybe it’s a way of pretending he is there on some level. It’s
weird, I don’t even know what my
own motives are,” she said. “My
father died when I was 17. The
way we kept him alive was talking
about him all the time. But
there comes a point when that
stops, and I think that it doesn’t
stop on Facebook.
It just keeps going.”