Scott Simon, Twitter and Public Death

by Rob Moll

Late last month, NPR’s Weekend Edition host Scott Simon took his smartphone to his mother’s deathbed in the ICU. There he tweeted updates of his mother’s final moments to more than a million of his followers.

His tweets were in real-time—heartbreaking, vulnerable and often funny.

“I love holding my mother’s hand. Haven’t held it like this since I was 9. Why did I stop? I thought it unmanly? What crap.”

“I think I can safely reveal now that last night we snuck a dram of ‘grape juice’ to my mother. Nurses shocked, shocked!”

“Heart rate dropping. Heart dropping.”

“The heavens over Chicago have opened and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped onstage.”

Within the most technologically equipped room many of us may ever occupy, and using the most modern of communication devices, Scott Simon resurrected an ancient tradition—the public death.

Twitter and other social media platforms are criticized for being banal or frivolous or even inappropriate, and some folks thought “live-tweeting” a mother’s death is exactly the kind of thing that’s unsuitable online. Death is a private affair, one to be dealt with sensitively and among family. Our attitude isn’t only that death is private in a bedroom closet, this-is-my-personal-stuff kind of way. Death is private because when we make it public, we impose a burden on others. When death is public, it makes people uncomfortable.

Our privacy about death, our unwillingness to force others to think about their mortality, is unusual. For centuries death was as normal as eating and making love, working and bathing. Death was a part of life, and accepting it as such, thinking about it and what it means, was necessary.

American historian Gary Laderman describes how modern life shifted how people thought about the end of life. “As individuals in larger communities and major urban centers grew more and more alienated from each other, social solidarity in the face of death dissolved.” We were no longer willing to be confronted with the death of a stranger, and death no longer had any meaning except from the perspective of public health experts.

Learning to die used to be understood as essential to life. School children were taught as they learned the alphabet, chanting “X: Xerxes the great did die/And so must you and I.” Michel de Montaigne, the father of the modern essay wrote, “To philosophize is to learn to die.” Christians, whose model of death was Jesus himself, had a set of practices around dying that held together until the nineteenth century. Dying well was an act of performance art, one that 150 years ago was commonly called “the beautiful death.”

Christians believed the dying person, with her heart turned toward eternity, had much to teach those of us still living. My favorite practitioner of the public death was John Donne. A poet and a priest, he spent his last summer editing a book of sermons, which he considered to be his life’s work and his legacy. Donne had already published his book of reflections on dying, which he had written after an illness that nearly took his life. At the time, church bells rang out announcing the deaths of Londoners who were dying of an outbreak of plague. It was then that he wrote, “No man is an island / Entire of itself / Every man is a piece of the continent / A part of the main … Therefore do not send to know for whom the bell tolls / It tolls for thee.”

Once his book was complete, Donne then preached what many considered to be his own funeral sermon. Preaching to King James after a summer away, no one was prepared to see his how ill he was. They said he had “a decayed body and a dying face.” Still he preached, saying life is one kind of death after another, from birth to youth, to old age, and finally to death. “Though … we pass from death to death, yet, as Daniel speaks, the Lord our God is able to deliver us, and he will deliver us.” After the sermon, Donne went directly to his bed and until his death offered last words to his loved ones, friends, and family.

Americans today aren’t nearly as flamboyant about death as Donne was, though Scott Simon called his mother’s death her “last great performance.” It does seem we are finding new ways to practice the public death. Pastor Rick Warren has grieved his son's suicide publicly and with incredible transparency. When Steve Jobs died, the country was transfixed not just by the story of his life, but by his dying words, "Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow." In 2007, Tammy Fay Bakker died just days after appearing on Larry King Live with a face that resembled John Donne’s. Roger Ebert told the story of his own dying of cancer through his popular blog which mixed movie reviews and personal essays. The atheist writer Christopher Hitchens publicly railed against his cancer while steadfastly refusing the consolation of faith at the end of life.

When someone today dies in public, we are often quick to admire her courage. But if we stop there, we miss the opportunity to reflect on what death means for ourselves. By putting life into its proper perspective, public dying teaches us what is important: the relationships we have with friends and family and the experiences we have with them. Public dying allows us all to peek into that uncommon spiritual moment when a life enters eternity, a time when Christians traditionally believed we could catch a glimpse of heaven. It encourages us to pay special attention to those small lovely things in life—the kinds of things we tweet about—that we often say are worth appreciating and yet are so easy to overlook. We need the confrontation with mortality offered by the public death. Twitter may be inappropriate for some aspects of life, but death isn’t one of them.

Rob Moll (@mollrob.) is a former hospice volunteer and the author of The Art of Dying: Living Fully in the Life to Come. An editor at large for Christianity Today, his forthcoming book is What Your Body Knows About God. (IVP, 2014)

Editor's Note: Image by Liebeslakritze.

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