Todd Terwilliger

I was sitting in a small church in Black Rock, Dundalk, Ireland, staring down at a hymn sheet. It was Christmas Eve and I was looking intently at the lyrics to “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”.

I’m sure I’d looked at the lyrics before (it was always one of my favorite hymns) but, just now, it struck me that I’d always read it as “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen” which was wrong but that’s what I’d always remembered and though I ought to have been following the rest of the lyric and letting nothing me dismay, I was, in fact, deeply dismayed, since I’d just found out a short time before that a friend of mine had passed away.

His name was Anthony. I’d only met him once. I knew him almost entirely through online interactions, via a forum I frequent and XBox Live. I suppose that a strong case could be made that I didn’t know him at all and maybe I didn’t, I’m not sure, but it felt like I knew him and if he was a real stranger and only a virtual friend, it didn’t somehow weaken the blow of reading that he had died. He wasn’t even the first online person I knew who died this year. James, another member of the same forum but whom I knew less, died in October.

Suddenly I found myself on foreign soil, in a strange church, wondering if someone, anyone (me?), would shuck off their mortal coil and fulfill the death rule of threes. Barring that, looking down at the sheet of hymns, I wished that capital-G God, if he/she/it was out there, would rest these two men that I may or may not have really known merry unto his breast/lap/cosmic shell/whatever.

Of course, this was months ago. It’s almost April now, just after Saint Patrick’s Day, it’s a high in the low seventies day today in New York City and it’s Friday. So why am I bringing back all these glummy bits of last December?

The easy answer is that last Friday I got to meet Dan, a member of this same forum from across the pond, who was here with friends performing at several midtown bars for Saint Patrick’s Day. Inevitably, the conversation turned to the departed which, in turn, turned my mind back to December, the church, and the hymn.

The internet is a strange place. It places a veil over everything and everyone it touches, rendering them timeless, ethereal, amorphic. In a real sense, I never expected any of these weird online creatures to actually die. That only happens to real flesh-and-blood people. It wasn’t supposed to happen to them.

Which is why such a thing had to happen because who would believe it could happen if it didn’t? That’s my cynical side talking. Yet, they are dead: two young men who nobody would ever have bet on in a dead pool. They’re dead, Jim, and can anyone say why? For what purpose? It makes no sense and therefore it is true. Because life makes no sense, and neither does death, so senselessness is the only thing that inherently makes sense, that accurately mirrors the world. Call it my unifying theory of nonsense. Lewis Carroll would be proud. Just don’t ask me what it means. I have no idea.

Dan wanted to meet as many online friends in the flesh as he could during his short trip here. It made sense. If this winter had taught us all anything, it’s that the feeling of permanence that we assigned to our online relationships was a convenient lie. The laws of nature were not circumvented by our routers and broadband connections. People died. Even online. May God, some god, any god, keep them merry.

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