Did you hear about Annie Wersching?
yeah i did :(((( when i first saw i legitimately thought it was a hoax or a misprint or something. like i've been thinking about her the past few days and it genuinely feels unreal. there's a gofundme for her family that maybe i should add
i've had some thoughts do you mind terribly if i rant about them. not rant that's like a mean word. but i've had something on my mind haha
so last year melanie ham, a craft youtuber and blogger, died at a similar age also from cancer and i remember seeing that announcement and not believing that either. like it felt unreal and very sudden even though she'd been mostly open about her health. and in the comments on a memorial video for her i remember seeing someone write to melanie's husband that she would carry melanie in every crochet stitch she made. technically i will too, melanie's videos were the first that actually got me to finish a granny square and were the ones that showed me i probably needed a hook with a grip rather than an inline hook. like that doesn't just go away. and the strange thing is there's no connection here whatsoever. that's kind of the point. i didn't know her as a person at all and the extent of my "interaction" with her was playing and pausing a youtube video. in theory, she taught me how to quilt, though she died before i could even first try quilting. and that makes me think of how i've used knitting patterns written by the deceased and how techniques carry over from generation to generation, but this feels so different from buying an elizabeth zimmerman book or something. it's not polished, published text; it's a demonstration video. you hear offhanded comments and you watch someone make mistakes. the digital memorial of them was never intended to be a memorial at all, but at the same time, that makes it strangely more meaningful in certain ways
there's a post on here i saw about how someone would go on google maps from time to time and look up their now-deceased mother's old address, for on streetview you could see their mother in the window of the house. it's blurry, but it lets you pretend she's still there, still in a house that has long since been sold, and the thought of losing that image feels painful to think about. taking a screenshot doesn't help. it's the fact that you can look up that address you've written down countless times and still see her there. taking a picture would render that almost meaningless. and i think about how people save the last texts someone sends them, or a voicemail, or a letter, but those had intention. those were directly written to them, and those were meant for them to see. it's different to see someone you've lost through the eyes of a stranger, or through a perspective without stakes. google streetview didn't care that there was someone in the house; they simply drove by and took pictures. if melanie's family looks back at her videos, they're not going to care about the sewing and crochet; they're going to care about seeing her in a context that was never really meant for them in the first place. there's plenty of discussion of what you would say if you had five more minutes with someone you lost, but this feels like seeing them in the grocery store, and they don't notice you. they're holding a list and they're looking for something, and you go to wave, but actually, maybe you don't want them to find you. and you watch as they pull something from a shelf and then cross that off on their list, and you watch them walk away, none the wiser. the lack of connection is the point. the fact that they weren't interacting with you is the point. it is a great privilege to watch someone you've loved and lost interact with the world again without having that interaction revolve around you
i think it's just that, if i turn on my playstation and put a game in, annie is still very much alive. it's all scripted and it's a character rather than her, but nothing has changed in that regard. and that's not the same as a film or tv show, in which everything follows one set path and you have no control over what happens unless you play, pause, or skip forward or back. with this, i can hear her get annoyed with me as a player when i take too long to do something. i can actually see the way she walks and how she fidgets when she's standing still for too long. the things her character says are in reaction to things that i as the player do. it's not real, but it was never supposed to be real. that memorial exists as long as i can put this disc into a console and start playing. and there's this immortality to it, but at the same time, you think about ten years from now when this console is defunct, and you feel that there's a time limit you can't really see. youtube channels are deleted all the time. streetview will have plenty of updates. and sometimes you do want there to be an eventual end date, a facebook page converted to a memorial losing its usefulness, but at the same time, you want to be able to look back again in ten years and see the wildly outdated comments your loved one left in response to someone else's post, the two of them talking about the first star wars revival or something. it's so stuck in the past that you can see just how much of your life you've lived without this person. but then, you want to put on a video of them made for someone else and feel as if nothing has changed.
i'm really curious about how digital memorials will persist given that like as a society or something we've had comparatively little experience with them. and i dont really know of another video game actor who's passed for whom similar things can be said though i imagine that there are others. it's just wild to me to have parts of people preserved in this way, especially in a way that was never meant to be preservation, but that makes it somehow more cathartic because they're acting as if they'll never be lost. like if everything continues in the digital age then someday we'll reach a point in which there are more dead facebook users than living ones. how will we cope with that? like what are we going to do about that? and you see people using animal crossing to create a grave for a loved one, or you see a work conference recording of your loved one as poetry, or you don't want to get rid of your old cell phone because it's the last one they ever texted. i think the standard response to this would be to say that digital stuff inherently isn't real, but this feels irreconcilably real to me. there has never been another time in history in which i can play a video game and see someone's mannerisms and watch them walk around long after their death. definitely been thinking about that a lot
it must be said that tess wouldn't have been tess without annie, and that annie seemed like such a kind and genuine person, abundantly so. no one else could've gotten tess the way annie got tess. she had a lot more left to do and had a lot more art in her. obviously i didn't know her so i can't speak to anything else, but the people who knew her have all said plenty about that already. what an unbelievably massive loss
