Last week, University of Notre Dame student Declan Sullivan died after the hydraulic lift he was working on toppled over. Sullivan, a film student, was taping a Notre Dame football practice. The video was to help the coaching staff prepare the Fighting Irish for their game against the unheralded University of Tulsa that weekend. The storied Fighting Irish lost.
While accidents, even the most gruesome and tragic will inevitably happen from time to time, Sullivan's death was far from unforeseeable. The shaky tower was far from sturdy, and 50 mile per hour winds had been whipping around the stadium all day. One of the people who anticipated problems was Sullivan himself. As he climbed the tower, Sullivan took to Twitter to let his 41 followers know his working conditions were less than safe:
Gusts of wind up to 60 mph. Well today will be fun at work. I guess I've lived long enough... Holy f***. Holy f***. This is terrifying.
Less than hour later, Sullivan would be dead.
Was Sullivan actually terrified? Did Sullivan really think he was going to die if he went up that tower? Probably not. If he did, he wouldn't have gone up to begin with, no matter what pressure he was under. He was most likely engaging in the type of youthful hyperbole everyone does while they're on Twitter or Facebook. He was young, and thought he was invincible.
This scenario was mirrored by that of Simon Ng. Ng, an international student enrolled in college in the US kept a blog on the once popular Xanga site. An anime and videogame fanatic, Ng kept a diary of his gaming and anime adventures for his friends to read. His May 12th, 2005 entry however was different in tone than his usual flippant remarks:
Anyway today has been weird, at 3 some guy ringed the bell. I went down and recognized it was my sister's former boyfriend. He told me he wants to get his fishing poles back. I told him to wait downstair while I get them for him. While I was searching them, he is already in the house. He is still here right now, smoking, walking all around the house with his shoes on which btw I just washed the floor 2 days ago! Hopefully he will leave soon, oh yeah working on the jap report as we speak!
The former boyfriend was later convicted of murdering Ng and his sister that night. Ng's blog entry was one of the primary pieces of evidence used to convict the former boyfriend at trial.
As Twitter and Facebook become more and more prevalent in our day to day lives, it seems inevitable that it will become a catalogue for our eventual deaths as well. During the Virginia Tech shootings, me and a few classmates compelled by morbid curiosity searched the victims on Facebook, looking for last second words and thoughts. Previously, these moments were the most private, usually between the person dying and his or her family. Now we can all see what is inside the mind of someone as they come closer and closer to the precipice.
Reading Sullivan and Ng's entries, I couldn't help but think of my own youth, and the close-calls we all probably had in our younger days. Like when I was 8, nearly getting hit by a car racing across the street, trying to get back to school in time to avoid getting caught playing video games at the corner store. Would a forty-year old with a wife and kid have been as likely to knowingly risk his life just to tape a football practice? Or would a more streetwise thirty-five year old let a stranger into his house? Probably not. But at least I now know I wasn't the only one so foolish in my youth.
Filmed, stored and replayed, our afterlife will be one constant loop.