Cyberheaven
--by Ian Brown, aired on "Sunday Morning," CBC Radio, February 11, 1996

A few weeks ago I mentioned on the radio that a friend of mine had died. His name was Yuri Rubinsky, and he was 43 years old.

A couple of days later, strange things began to happen.

Yuri worked in the computer business...and after my brief eulogy...E-mail messages...notes from the Internet...began to pile up in my computer. They were messages from people I didn't know, but who had known Yuri.

They were short notes, but full of specific details. I knew Yuri too, they said. We met in high school. We listened to Sergeant Pepper together for the first time. He had a wild beard. That sort of thing.

Now, I'm normally no fan of the Internet. I find it slow, cumbersome, undeservingly opinionated, and obsessed with trivia and anonymous sex. It's touted as the democracy of cyberspace, but in my experience it's more often fractious and confusing. But this was different. These messages about my late friend...kept his spirit alive...more vividly and more steadily...than had been my experience after the death of anyone else. When someone died in the past, I remembered them when I could. But in cyberspace, Yuri has never ceased to exist.

There are reasons for this. One is that the messages were intensely personal, and made me want to reply. My replies in turn produced other messages.

Before long Yuri had more of a presence in my computer than he had had, these last few busy years, in my life. It was as if people were still passing around his spirit...as if his ghost had spoken up.

This was new to me. Grief takes on a life of its own on the Net...almost as a replacement for the life that has been lost. When Yuri died, he left a hole in me ...But on the Internet...in this new computerized funeral parlour...the mourning ground of cyberspace...he came to life again, turning up as unexpectedly as he did in real life.

What I was experiencing...though I hesitate to use the word...was a resurrection. And a very believable one at that. The messages in my electronic mailbox were disembodied, as e-mail messages always are. But they were undeniably present in spirit, still warm from the sending...just as people are after they die.

At first I thought I was over-amping, imagining the power of this presence. But then I received a message from a Montreal professor named Jean-Claude Guedon. I didn't know him, but he too had once met Yuri, and he too had noticed a similar cyberspace resurrection after the death of his own wife. "There is a kind of presence, of being-there, in cyberspace that is unique," he wrote, via the computer. "It was as if a sweet, long, wrapping wake was taking place, reinforced by other events in real life, echoing also with them, but with a quality all of its own."

This digital wake for our friend Yuri let both of us open our hearts to one another fearlessly...because it was happening in the invisible realm of cyberspace. We didn't have to face one another. "If death is so harrowing to survivors," Professor Guedon wrote, "it's because it snaps off communication with someone else in an irremediable way.

And the Net, through its communicational essence, heals exactly where we need to be healed. Only face to face conversations with friends could do more, but as you cannot modulate a conversation's pace and intensity, so it can also hurt a lot more." Mourning on the Internet was less painful mourning, and somehow deeper.

Of course it'll never replace a funeral. Like most people, I dread them. They're terrifying.

At a funeral, my mind fills with shocking, inappropriate thoughts. "How could he die this week , when I am so busy?" I think. Only for a moment, for sure, but the thought does occurs to me. And then: what is that twinging in my arm? Will I be the next to go? And then I feel guilty for thinking of myself.

Or filing out of the church, someone tells a fond joke about the dead person, and we laugh, and immediately we worry that we've shown some disrespect. Funerals are a thousands agonizing moments like that.

And then there's the worst moment of all: the confrontation with the survivors, the loved ones left behind. Our fears of saying too much or not enough go out the window, and we revert to what we know best...the physical. We embrace. But even this is fraught with tension.

I embrace the mother who's son has died...I feel her flesh beneath my hands, squeezing into the spaces between my fingers...and I think, why are you noticing her body at this terrible time? What's wrong with you? But of course it isn't something to be ashamed of. It's not sex. It's just the physical, the solidity of the body...the single most reassuring thing we have to hang onto--in the most literal sense--in the face of death. As if some hole has opened in the ground and swallowed one of us, and much as we miss the person who slipped away, we don't want anyone else to go, and so we hold on...disloyal to the dead even in the act of grieving for them. Because as soon as death reminds where we're all going, life reminds us of where we still have to get to.

It's these tensions, this invisible struggle of our loyalties between the dead and the living, that remind us of what it means to be alive...and herefore of what death is.

Well...there's none of that human fray in the funeral parlour of cyberspace...and of course no one would want to replace a funeral. Internet grief has a different function.

I understood what it was a few days after the cyber-eulogies began to float in. I found myself, like other people, reluctant to delete Yuri's e-mail address from my computer. I still haven't. And I think my hesitation is significant...something new to this technical time and age we live in...and something radical.

My friend...our friend, if I include my fellow mourners in cyberspace...is gone.

But Yuri's e-mail address...his location in the not quite real, but more than unreal, ether of cyberspace...is still there. If the place where he was, where he could be reached in cyberspace, is still there, who is to say that he is not there now? How is the memory of him on the Net...still very much a living thing...any less real...any less corporeal...than his presence was on the Net when he was alive? Then he was there, but not there; now, he is not there, but he's there. He can't answer back; others have to answer for him. But that's the only difference, physically. In computer space, we are all auras and phantoms and ghosts, whether we are living or dead. And that makes the Internet...the virtual grave...the closest thing to an afterlife that any of us have known.

Maybe the Internet will become our heaven.

For Sunday Morning, this is Ian Brown.