© irene waters 2015
I attended the Dead, Dying and Undead Conference last week where I gave a paper on writing death. Other people gave papers on vampires, Nurses who kill: nazi nurses, first world war Australian nurses the Bluebirds, good deaths, imaging death and Jack the Ripper. All the papers I attended were fascinating even though at times somewhat confronting.
From Associate Professor Piatti-Farnell, a leading expert on vampires having published numerous books on vampires the latest The vampire in Contemporary Popular Literature available from Routledge, I learnt the genetic structure of vampires and their relationship with humans. How they form, live and die and how they reflect our own morality and mortality.
Dr Hughes gave an indepth overview of research into the field of immortality. It is perhaps getting closer but the one example of a person who believed he had conquered it saw the man taking 450 pills per day. I think I’d prefer to be dead. Imagine your entire life would be revolving around swigging the next lot down.
The paper given by Professor Donna Lee Brien had me gob smacked. I had no idea such web sites were out there. Her paper was on your online presence when you died and ways of setting up someone who could administer your presence. (It is next to impossible to remove yourself from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others unless you are well prepared ahead of your demise. This wasn’t what surprised me though.
WHEN YOUR HEART STOPS BEATING: YOU KEEP TWEETING.
This is the logo of LivesOn. A site that will continue to make your tweets for you after you are gone. The problem, however, is that you probably will spend what remains of your life setting it up, and teaching it to respond as you would to current affairs, television programmes, political events and anything else you may be in the habit of tweeting about.
Another site will post (you write them first) to Facebook for you up to a maximum of 999 years after your death. Naturally you pay a fair amount for the service but I want to know do you get a refund if Facebook doesn’t survive that long.
There is another site that will look after your affairs after death. It contacts you by email every week and if you don’t respond for three consecutive notices it automatically sends emails to everyone telling them you are dead, and passwords and all information regarding your affairs to the person you nominate to receive it. I think if I was on this plan my friends would often be informed erroneously that I had met my demise.
Reflections and Nightmares- Irene A Waters (writer and memoirist) 
Fascinating conference, and I’m as gobsmacked as you — keep on tweeting??? I had heard of “legacy” social media but didn’t really know what that meant. If anything, it makes me want to come up with a living will that reads, “Shut it all down!” What makes it to print, great, but I’m not Facebooking for eternity! And like you, I could erroneously misinform email recipients of my death. Too funny! But a great topic. One we usually shy away from discussing.
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For such a sombre subject it was a great sharing of different viewpoints across the various disciplines and the attendees were full of life.
It is impossible to shut things down unless you have given your passwords to someone with the instructions to do it. The problem is that you have so many passwords and keeping up with all the changes you would have to constantly be revising the lot. It becomes a real problem for parents whose children have died where they don’t know the passwords and sometimes aren’t face book friends and they can’t gain access to see the memorials or close it down. A topic that needs more discussion.
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Tweeting and Facebooking after your death – gives new meaning to mindless.
I think people should stop trying to forestall what is inevitable and make better use of their lives here on earth. So much to be done; imagine how much could be accomplished with half the effort suggested by LivesOn. People would live on in the deeds they perform before their demise. A free legacy worth everything.
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Absolutely Sharon. I cannot understand it myself. It did make me aware of some issues but why you would want to be a virtual presence passes me by. I asked whether the takers up of this were predominantly young people but the speaker didn’t know. Leaving a legacy whilst you are hear seems a much better way to go and of more benefit to those living.
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I’m just wondering what will happen to those of us who have published books on Amazon? What happens when we die? They didn’t ask us to set up anyone to inherit our payments.
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I have no idea. I guess that is something to investigate. Interesting.
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Good Lord! I am as gobsmacked as you Irene, I had no idea! I was curious about your conference, thanks for posting about it, it sounds absolutely fascinating 🙂
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It would never enter my head to want to do that but I guess I would not want to be frozen either in order to come back at a later time.
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Oooh…can you imagine? My daughter wants to get our cats stuffed when they die as she can’t bear to be without them. But that’s a bit different than freezing a human head isn’t it? I think…
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When I was your daughter’s age I wanted the 6 foot fish tank in the loungeroom to be filled with formalin. I would be put in to float around so I could still be part of what was going on. 😖 I don’t understand the me of then.
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Haha…that just cracks me up Irene 😀 You are so funny, I can’t stop laughing!! The image you’ve given me of you floating in that fish tank beggars belief!!! But you give me great hope when I think of some of my daughter’s other strange and macabre ideas, the least of which is a stuffed crow in her room, A beautiful specimen he is, called Jon Crow (after Jon Snow from Game of Thrones). Eddie tried to get it once, and the sight of a black cat with a full size stuffed crow in his mouth trying to race across her bedroom was quite the sight. Perfect for Halloween thinking about it, LOL 😀
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LOL I have to say a crow would freak me out – I seem to get bombed by them in spring. Just about to start I would think when they sit in the trees high up until their victim is in sight and it is always me. 🙂
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Yikes…no wonder it would freak you out!
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Yes I feel like I have been put into Hichcock’s Birds.
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Now that’s a scary film isn’t it? And then that scene in The Omen when a raven pecks the woman’s eyes out…oh dear, maybe I shouldn’t have said that 😮 Keep safe Irene!!!!!
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I plan to Sherri. 🙂
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I have one thought: why should I care about it? I won’t be around to care. The only thing would be income from books, but you can always designate a recipient for that with your bank. Still, I think that conference must have been fun!
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Yes I have been asked how can you be guaranteed that the site will do what it says it does and that is exactly what I say. Who cares. You won’t know about it either way. It was a great conference. Some very different perspectives.
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