Death: Tattoos, T-shirts and the Internet

The tragedy of the young dying is one shared world-wide. In poorer communities the young die of hunger and disease. In most all countries it is not uncommon for young working class kids to also die from violence.

In Oakland, California, with a population of 300,000, we generally lose over a hundred people to homicide annually. A large majority of these are young people caught in the crossfire. They are remembered, culturally, on t-shirts and tattoos. High school graduation pictures come up on white shirts bylined with parentheses stating year born and year died.

At a tattoo parlor up on McArthur Boulevard recently I was a little shocked that the majority of people waiting and being tattooed on were women. Times have changed. They were also mostly youngish, non-white, and busy texting and laughing loudly while waiting their time in the chair. I asked Dominic, my buddy, who tattoos there, what were the most popular tattoos. While there’s quite a breadth of subjects the steady majority are names. The names of loved ones; children and the recently departed. Those not to be forgotten.

Having lost a niece recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about loss and how we deal with it.

Tattoos have been around since tribal society. T-shirts are a newer phenomena. The internet is the newest.

After my niece died, a friend of hers set up a Facebook site for people to visit and leave messages. Over 550 people did so. Most did so in the week and a bit between my niece’s death and her funeral. But still people visit and leave comments. One of her parents left a message in the middle of the day last week, simply asking WHY????? It totally shook me up.

In decades past people would visit gravesites and talk with the dead. While death is instant and irreversible, feelings are not.

People want to talk and share. It is what we do as a species. And especially as the socially-dependent species that we are.

The rich put up their statues to the dead, their cenotaphs, all intended to remind us how powerful they are even after their last breaths. For us we have photoalbums, t-shirts, tattoos and the internet. There is no shame for us in death, we wear our hearts on our sleeves.