Saddiversaries – are they a fresh hell?

Michele Kirsch mulls them over and makes a few confessions

Saddiversary. A useful neologism, or an obvious reminder that the dead live on forever, whether we like it or not?

Many years ago, in the early days of internet searches, I found out that an old friend I was trying to find again, a guy called Buzzy, who had a dour nature, a way with words, an obsession with Baudelaire and a face that looked slightly wolverine, had died.

We had worked together on a newspaper, The Soho Weekly News, in New York City, and remained close friends for a long time after the paper folded. We had a shared love of The Velvet Underground, tiny spaces, and Valium. He had become a taxi driver, and was living, massively illegally, in a storage space where distributors of magazines and newspapers used to store all their unsold copies. The space was owned by Warhol, and it was tiny and not habitable. Buzzy had built all his ‘furniture’ including a toilet of sorts (a hollowed out chair with bin bag receptacle) and a bed which was an old, dirty mattress on top of a base of all the unsold copies of the Brook Shields cover of Interview magazine.

There is another story, only tangentially to do with this one, where he accidentally locked me in the room of magazines to go to a Seminary to consider a life to do with the clergy. I was there for two days, or three, in exaggerated versions. Either way, you really haven’t lived until you have shat into a binbag lined with shredded copies of the Tom Cruise cover issue of Interview magazine.

Buzzy would have been great at funerals, for all his suits and his entire person had a funereal bearing. But then he did the most funereal thing ever, which was to die, himself.

When I found this out, several years after the event, through a friend of a friend of friend, which eventually led me to a guy called Lanny - I was living in London with a young family, a busy, hectic life and most importantly, a life preoccupied with LIVING, instead of dying. Suddenly, through an email, which ended: ‘PS: Don’t smoke,’ I was thrust back into my youth, my love for Buzzy who was not only a friend but a really fucked up mentor - in the sense that as wonderful as he was to me - I didn’t want to live a life like his. Still, the email from Lanny made me cry, and when my then husband came into the room, he asked why I was crying, and I told him one of my best friends had died.

Buzzy

‘Wow, who? Oh no!’ he said. Or something like that, but with more feeling.

‘Oh a guy you never knew, my NY days, some time ago. He was …. Brilliant. I really loved him.’

‘Well, how long ago? Why am I just hearing about this, now?’

‘Oh I never mentioned him because he was from another life, you know.’

I suddenly felt like Greta from James Joyce’s very best story, The Dead, where the wife cries at an old song she hears, because she remembers a boy she used to go walking with, sang it under her window, and then she was sent away to school, and the boy died of consumption. In the story, the main guy, Conroy, suddenly feels that his wife loved this boy more than she loves him. He sees himself as a buffoon, rather than a young, consumptive boy singing love songs to his gal on a frozen night. She is still in love with the dead. As was I.

My husband was perplexed. He wanted to know if I had lost touch with Buzzy, why was I so upset about his death? Who was he, anyway? Why had he never heard of him before this?

All fair questions, and I wallowed. Boy, did I wallow. And my husband got irritated. He wanted to know how long I was going to be sad about this? I didn’t know, and wrote a piece about it, calling it Google Grief, about the appropriate response and timeline for grieving over a person you had not been in touch with for ages. I calculated about four days, or maybe less. Then they - the irritating living who get in the way of your personal Gothfest - expect you to buck up, get back with the living and go to Tesco because we’re out of cheese strings.

Again, I digress, but you can Google the term Google Grief and the article will come up. I guess I invented it, except I wish I hadn’t, because although that was about finding out about people you have lost touch with anyway, dying without your permission, I am now finding myself to be slightly or more than slightly irritated at this NEWish internet thing, which some people call Saddiversaries, which is noting the death anniversary of someone they have loved, or someone they didn’t know but were famous and they loved. Amy, Luther, Kurt, John. There are photos of candles and praying hands emojis and terrible poems that you would see on a Hallmark card, or that bloody Auden poem from Four Weddings and a Funeral, the famous one about stopping the clocks. Which was later worked into a cabaret number. Not a bad poem until everyone started quoting from it.

The worst, and I think this was pre-mass internet, was when Diana died. The brilliant writer Michael Bracewell called it a necrathon, a sort of mass hysteria of millions of people who never had that Lady Di round theirs for a cuppa, some digestives and a fag. Me, I was not particularly arsed, though it seemed to be your patriotic duty to be so. By that time in my life, I had experienced enough loss at close range, to not particularly care about the famous, dying. Suddenly, everyone was a trainee obituary writer.

Now I understand this, on a deep, personal level. For many years I was champion griever, chief performative breast beater at the loss of any friend or relative, though it did not feel performative at the time. I was not looking for sympathy, or even to be centre stage in the sadness.

I was just really good at being sad.

And for someone who has just lost someone, like recently, I completely get the need to get the word out, for it is not really about ‘Look at me, look how sad I am’ but more about the change of circumstances, the need to announce the news, so that people will understand if you go off radar for a while. Or that people might do practical things for you, like bring round a meal or a bottle of Stoly and a couple of Xanax. Or on a healthier level, just BE there, to listen, to understand, to do the stuff you feel constitutionally unable to do, for the time being.

Paul, a friend and so much more, who also died

But the anniversary thing? On the internet? I’m not so sure. Privately, yes, I think it is important to have rituals, to have a little prayer, or light a candle, to go sit on their commemorative bench in the cemetery, to lay some flowers, or plant some bulbs, but to display it so publicly, I mean, what does that achieve? A shedload of sad face emojis, to which the sad person then has to muster a response of some sort. This internet stuff isn’t real life anyway. That person who writes, ‘Sorry for your loss’ may not only not know the person you are posting about, but not even know you, because they are a guy stationed on a military submarine, a widower, whom you only friended ‘cos you felt sorry for them, and now they pester you with their submarine photos and marriage proposals.

Now like all the rules I make up in my head, there are exceptions. If you are recently bereaved, there is solace in socials as well as real life. People might have something very useful to share from their own sad experience. And in the first year or two following that loss, I do think to acknowledge it on the web can be a good way to sort of make it LESS, to put distance between you and the departed, to show that they live on in your heart and you are still pretty bloody sad and everything, and that if you are low key for a while, this is why. To spread the news is to share it, and to share it can be, in some cases, to thin it out. And in others, to magnify or extend it.

But it can lead to those blurred lines of ‘Maybe I can help someone else by sharing my experience’ and a press released pity party. I have made the mistake of the latter persuasion many times, and after the tea and sympathy run out, people do get kinda bored. Nobody really wants to hear your relived loss, not the guy on the submarine, (not that you care) or even your real-life friends, because THEY are still living. By going on, and on about the superiority of the dead, you are dissing the living, even if that is not your intention. In the end, we are all Conroy-buffoons, never quite as good or great or romantic as the boy who died of consumption in the snow.

But longer than that, we (the responders, the posters of broken hearts, crying faces and ‘Here for you, huns’) run out of stuff to say, and that though we can’t drag them into the land of the living, nor should they drag us into the land of our own, personal losses. I read an article which was entitled, ‘What NOT to say to those who are in a death anniversary’ and one of the most nauseating pieces of advice was to tell the person ‘Give yourself permission to grieve’ as if you yourself are giving them the permission to do so. Who died and made YOU the boss….oh… wait…

And the main thing is, is that words are rarely adequate, which is why so many posts in response to ‘saddiversaries’ start with , ‘I have no words,’ or ‘Words can not express…’ because indeed, they can’t.

So am I calling for a statute of limitations on saddiversaries, or merely expressing my baffled wonder at their relentless proliferation? Am I a heartless bitch, or merely trying to figure out a different way to honour those who are bereaved year after year? Well, a bit of both, and also, neither.

I love to see photos of a young fella I knew way back when, posted on the anniversary of his death or ‘heavenly birthday.’ Because it draws me back into the land of HIS life, how much joy he brought to those that knew him, and he did bring a lot of joy, wit and smarts to the world he inhabited. He was a flame haired force of nature, and his loss left a great hole in not only his family’s life but in the lives of his friends and extended family.

But I also think, less is more. A photo, faded, a bit ripped at the sides or curled up in the way the old Poloroids did, says more to me about the life of the dead person than all the no doubt well intentioned responses to the anniversary. It shows us the person, a life well lived, not the aftermath. We all KNOW what that feels like.

Mally Powell, an old friend who went too soon.

The first few years after my best friend died, I would visit his Facebook page and post, along with others, letters to him, as if he could read them in some celestial World Wide Web. Some of it, those letters to him, were heartfelt, but others, penned by myself, wanted his other friends to know that I was by FAR the saddest motherfucker of all of ‘em, that I OWNED this death. Bear in mind he had left behind a widow, his parents, a sister and many other friends, all of whom, conducted themselves with great, quiet dignity.

I am ashamed of that time, and yet I still peek on his page now and then, but never post. Oddly enough, one of the last articles he wrote (he was a musician and journalist) was about how hard it was to DIE on social media, how hard it was for others to delete the account, that in that strange way, everyone would be famous not only for the 15 minutes Warhol allocated to those in the future, but forever.

Lizzie, another friend who died too soon. On Santa Monica beach. A fave photo.

Me, I have long ago abandoned the social media of the dead. Nor do I post on their death anniversaries. The older you get, the more dead people you know. And it doesn’t bring me to a good or useful place to dwell in the land of the past, or passed on. You might feel otherwise, but I implore you, as none of us is getting any younger (the hint is in the title of this organisation) to dip your toes into the virtual grave, and then hop back quickly into the land of the living. It’s more fun, here.