Strange as it sounds, Toni Bernhard doesn’t know if one of her closest friends is dead or alive. Marilyn lives (or lived) in Sydney, Australia, about seven thousand miles from Toni’s home in Davis, California. Toni knew all about Marilyn’s ongoing treatment for late-stage breast cancer and suddenly, after a year and a half of daily correspondence, Marilyn’s name stopped popping up in Toni’s in-box. She could only expect the worst. “I felt completely cut off,” Toni says. “I don’t know Marilyn’s husband; I don’t even know if he knows how close we are. I have no other way of getting in touch with her. I went from being in constant contact with someone I just adored to a complete blackout.”
Toni, sixty-six, is virtually bedridden, and conducts most of her friendships via e-mail. After contracting what she and her husband jokingly called “the Paris flu”—she caught it while they were on a long-anticipated trip to France in 2001—Toni, astoundingly, did not recover. “My immune system never went back to normal. It’s like having the flu all of the time, or an extreme feeling of jet lag. The doctors call it ‘chronic immune system activation.’ They’re hoping that something will happen to reset it. I’m always trying anti-virals, acupuncture, and Western and Eastern modalities. So far, nothing has worked.”
A former professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law, Toni had to quit her beloved job and scale her life down to fit the limitations her body imposed. She fell into a depression. Eventually, she began reading blogs by and for chronic illness sufferers. A witty comment or thoughtful observation occasionally compelled her to make direct contact with an intriguing fellow poster. Some of those exchanges mushroomed into friendships. Then Toni, who has studied Buddhism since 1992, began to write a book, How to Be Sick: A Buddhist-Inspired Guide for the Chronically Ill and Their Caregivers, about her slowly accepting stance toward her illness, inspired by Buddhist philosophy. She started a Facebook page to promote the endeavor and watched with delight as it sprouted an active community of people dealing with chronic illness. It was the book, in fact, that first prompted Marilyn to e-mail her.
Toni currently has four other close Internet friends. They are all women with chronic illnesses, but that circumstance no longer dominates their exchanges. A few have been in daily contact with Toni for eight years now. “My friends used to be people here in Davis, and coworkers. I don’t have much in common with my former friends anymore. They would do anything for me, if I called them, but we don’t have, for example, the students to talk about or complain about anymore.” She does touch base with two “3-D” friends on a weekly basis: Richard, whom she’s known since college, and Dawn, whose kids grew up with Toni’s. If she’s feeling well, she meets Dawn at a coffee shop; otherwise, Dawn, a realtor, stops by the house to chat.
“It’s interesting,” Toni muses. “My relationship with Dawn is richer because we’ve shared more experiences and know each other’s kids. But with my friend in New Hampshire, we write things like ‘I’m holding you in my heart,’ and ‘Dearest, how are you?’ or even ‘I love you.’ I would never talk to Dawn that way! It would be totally out of character. I think you’re willing to put things in writing that you don’t say face-to-face. I’m tempted to say that I’m closer to Dawn because I can call on her if I need her. But these other friends are people I e-mail either every day or every other day. With Dawn or Richard, we don’t say, ‘What happened on Monday?’ One of us raises some subject, and we discuss that. It means I know less about their day-to-day lives than those of my Internet friends.”
But couldn’t it be that Toni, who doesn’t even video chat via Skype with these friends because it tires her and she finds it awkward, is simply projecting qualities onto these disembodied souls with whom she claims such communion? “I might have felt that way in the first few months of knowing them. But all these years later, I’ve seen all sides. I’ve seen their crankiness.” One friend, Laura, initially conveyed a Pollyannaish tone in her e-mails that made Toni doubt whether they could ever truly become close, even given Toni’s efforts to cultivate a “Zen” attitude. “She had a positive gloss on everything—you know, ‘God has a reason.’ Then she had an MS flare-up, and she started to be more honest with me. At first she was apologetic and would write, ‘It’s not the right way to feel.’ I would write back: ‘But it is how you feel!’ We broke through the façade.
“I sometimes complain to my husband that I love my Internet friends, but it’s not as satisfying as being with someone in the flesh that you can touch. And there are just so many nuances that don’t come through in an e-mail.” Since she’s been married for four decades, it’s also difficult for Toni to have friends her husband doesn’t know at all. But the complementary aspect of having Richard and Dawn on one hand, and her electronic pals on the other, fulfills Toni’s friendship needs.
Toni is even grateful to have come down with her debilitating condition at this point in history. “If you’re going to get sick, it’s good to do so in the Internet age,” she says. “Many women with chronic illnesses tell me that the Internet is their savior.” To say the loss of her friendship with Marilyn is less painful than it would be had they known each other in person is to underestimate the intensity of feeling that can run through global data streams. But it would, at the same time, underestimate the benefits of the shared ties that we have with more traditionally formed friendships—because the friendship existed outside of their respective social networks, Toni likely won’t get a phone call from someone who knew Marilyn and who can grieve along with her, helping her through that process. “Marilyn was someone I had this wonderfully silly friendship with,” Toni says with audible sadness. “She would play games on her iPad. I would too, and we would take screen shots of our scores and such. I’m starting to realize that she is gone from me.”
I probably don’t need to tell you that the way we go about the business of friendship has fundamentally changed since the rise of the Internet twenty years ago. (Friendship has even become the basis of many actual Internet businesses during that time) The very use of the word “friend” has expanded—who would have foreseen ten years ago that “to friend” would be a verb? Yet the tritest comments to arise in discussions on the intersection of technology and friendship are along the lines of “I hate to break it to you, but your 1,000 Facebook friends are not your friends.” I think even social-media novices distinguish between “friends” as shorthand for online contacts and true friends. Nonetheless, in today’s media environment, real friends are commingling with other people who are less than “friends” more than ever before, on our screens, and, perhaps, in our consciousness.
~~Friendfluence -by- Carlin Flora
No comments:
Post a Comment