Last night my book group got together.
As was pointed out last night, this group of about 6 to 10 women has been together once a month for years. And while we have a few people that come and go and others that don’t come every time (right now I’m on a every other month schedule because currently half the time they are meeting during the day) the ‘core’ group of us has been constant for over a decade.
D was taking pictures last night and has some sort of creative plan to do with them. She pointed out that with all the time, we have no pictures of us all together.
As was normal for us, over the 2 hours we were together we spent maybe 15 mins discussing the assigned book (Jacob’s Ladder by Donald McCaig – for the record I didn’t like it and gave up about 1/2 to 3/4 through it, but everyone else liked it.), about 30 mins discussing other things we were reading, and about 90 mins discussing our lives and the place our husbands/partners work at (or are retired from.)
Aside from that connection, we are a varied group. We range from elderly and widowed to a (relatively) young women with kids still in elementary school. We also range from very conservative to liberal and very religious to …well, me. It makes for some interesting …discussions. We also cause each other to read things that aren’t on our usual reading lists.
So, past the two stages of book discussions we got started discussing ‘typical’ wedding costs. D has two daughters fairly newly out of college with lots of friends getting married and she got talking to them about weddings and they did some research; and so she asked us if we could guess what a typical (Midwestern) wedding would cost. Any ideas without Googling it?
Anyway, from there we started discussing photography and family backlogs of slides and photos and that got me thinking about my Dad.
I’ve talked about his ‘stuff” here, here, here, here, and here. My step-mom cleaned up his ‘stuff’ two years ago, seven/eight years after he died.
And that sort of sat until I was out today. When someone dies, at some point you clean out their stuff, pack it up, and close the door. But I still have Dad’s email address in my contact list on this computer. I’ve cleaned out broken emails a few times since then, but I’ve never deleted his. It’s only a bit or two of computer space….
And along that idea, I have a couple of friends on Facebook that have died recently. Both of their accounts are still open and it’s been over a year (or two) for one and months for the other. When do you clean up and close the door on electronic ‘stuff’?
I’ve been doing a bit of research into wedding-related things lately so my guess wouldn’t really be a guess. But I can tell you that when the time comes we’ll be feeding and entertaining 350 people and still be well below average.
I haven’t had to make any decisions about closing the door on electronic stuff. My dad wasn’t online. (Thank goodness. I don’t even want to think about the mess that could have been.) I do know that the facebook sites and blogs of several people who I have known who have died the past couple of years are still there.
It’s dwelling on that mess that got me wondering. I suspect the kids could get into my accounts and close them down, but could we get into Hubby’s? Do you want/need to at some point?
But one of y’all’s deceased FB friends also has a blog of her own (deeply thoughtful and carefully crafted) writings that I should grieve all over again to lose, and wouldn’t that be senseless? That would be like burning her books and papers to me, which you’d never do with a loved one’s writings. At least I wouldn’t. Too much librarian-scholar-history buff in me, I guess.
FB otoh, I can see a family gracefully closing down after condolence posting are no longer useful for active comforting . . .
You’re right JJ, and you may have noticed that I didn’t say anything about blogs closing down.
Because my mom was a pack-rat, and, even worse, a pack-rat of religious items, my sis and I cleared out her stuff pretty quickly after she died (well, also because I only had 2 weeks in town to help my sis and dad, so we had to do things quickly). She never had an online presence for us to deal with, fortunately.
I also have a friend who has a FB page and I hope her family will keep it around for a while because I want to see her name on my friends’ list to remember her by, among many other ways (photos, old Christmas cards, etc).
To answer your question, for me, I don’t care how quickly my family closes my accts after I die, but I hope the families of my friends don’t close their accounts if they die before I do. :}