Online Calendars

I am sure most of you out there who read things on the web are already well familiar with online calendars, or a localized outlook or iCal electronic calendar. The whole world uses them to schedule their lives. It is enormously useful. I have been using them for years now, I used mine to organize my interview process including when to send a follow-up, thank you or reminder. I use them all the time to arrange dates, to mark social events, to track histories of any organization (including fictional!), and to remind myself of people's birthdays.

And this is where it gets interesting. Because all of them come equipped with a "recurring" date feature, by which you can tell your calendar to add the same event on a daily, weekly, monthly (including abstracts like the second Thursday at 5 pm) and annually. So, for all my dear friends, you are dates on my calendar, marking your birth date and in so being reminded, I remember your birthday, and usually make good on letting you know in some way I want you to be happy all day. This is easy, this is common sense.

But we cannot remark and remember birth without also marking death. I have not considered adding dates of people's deaths to my calendar, rather, I wonder only now how it will feel to have a birthday reminder pop up for someone who has passed.

Will I keep the annual event in my calendar as a means to always remember their life and my love, or will I instead remove their birthday as a way of absolving the past and moving on with my life? Has it become in fact that we will live on in dates and times recorded on pop up reminders that trigger cascading emotional response in our loved ones who succeed us? Is eternity a Google calendar blip, large for a day and small for the month, destined to disappear the following month, only to re-arise like some digital gizmodic phoenix year upon year till finally those calendars too pass into a world much less speculated, yet as poignant and particular as our own misty afters.