Looking over my "On This Day" feed the past couple of days and May of last year has disappeared. I knew I had posts, I was doing the ISO POD list. (Isolation Picture of the Day) so I knew if I had started it on May 1 I wouldn't have ended it on May3. And, honestly, unless I've mentioned going on a Facebook fast the odds of me not posting multiple times in a day are slim to none. And yet...no on this day memories.
Then I realized what was going on. Facebook was helping again. May was rough last year. There was the whole pandemic thing. It was the first Mother's Day after Mom died. I lost a friend around the middle of the month. Then found out another had passed at the end. And then on the same day I found out we lost him we got the call from New Mexico that Ann was gone as well. It was a rough month. So Facebook is doing that thing where it just stops showing the memories.
There are about six weeks around my Dad's death that they never show me. The month of August 2019 is gone as well. And now it looks like May 2020 will be disappeared as well.
Which doesn't help.
I have to think that someone at Facebook is a fan of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Which, full disclosure, is one of those things that I hated so much I think people are pulling a prank on me when they talk about how much they love it. Like Jonathan Franzen books and Cirque du Soleil. But that sort of pretend it never happened doesn't work for me.
In fact it makes it worse. Especially as time goes by. Like I can be rolling along perfectly fine, enjoying the summer sunshine and how lovely June can be and then I notice that my On This Day feed skipped a year. And there is a moment of my brain registering why, Oh yeah...that's the year Dad died. So it actually works to call attention to it instead of hiding it.
Because that's the hard part of death. It's not the remembering. It's the vacancy. It's the missing parts. It's the hole that is left.
Posting about my feelings when someone dies is what I need to do to deal with it. And it also gives others a chance to share their memories which is so wonderful. To hear how those that were important to you were important to others is fabulous. And even to get the comfort from those that might not share your grief on a personal level but want to let you know how much they care about you. That's the good stuff of life. The connections.
By hiding those connections all that is left is the hole.
I've let Facebook know, multiple times, that I do not want them to do this. I've not asked for them to hide things. I don't like it. They actually have a tool you can use to hide people or memories you don't want to see. It's something you can manage on your own. But they are helpful and will do it for you if you don't.
It's frustrating.
Because it's not helpful. Not at all.
Memories are wonderful. For me even the sad ones are important. Remembering is what keeps them with me. Remembering how much it hurt when they left lets me know how lucky I was to have them at all.
And Facebook in their oh so helpful ways has blocked all of those memories.
Yet...
They still have shown Brent and I both a barrage of Mother's Day ads.
You know...to buy presents for our dead mothers.
That they are helpfully hiding memories of them dying.
Maybe so we forget and buy them something?
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