25 The Ghosts in our Machines

Every now and again, when I’ve been working for too many hours without a break or have spent an entire day writing something, I jump on Google Maps Street View and get lost in my past.

The images on Street View, taken by fancy cameras that are usually—though not always—strapped to the tops of cars, are a boon for basement-dwelling architecture buffs and those who want to see the world without going broke. I use the site for far less cosmopolitan purposes. I track down baseball diamonds and bike trails I played on as a kid. I locate comic-book shops from back in the day, old college dorms, hotels my family stayed in during summer vacations back when we took summer vacations as a family. I plop down in places I’ve been, places that have meant something to me, and look around. Then I compare the contemporary to what’s in my memory. It’s a way to unwind, a respite from more taxing laptop-based endeavors.

In some cases, the ball field or building I remember no longer exists. (I would never call the crummy two-story house I lived in during the summer between undergrad and law school paradise, but it was, in fact, knocked down, paved over, and turned into a parking lot.) Other times, I’ve happened upon more pleasant changes—beautiful flowerbeds that weren’t there in 1992, a new in-ground swimming pool at the rec center, better paint choices. When I really want to dig in, I’ll treat these Street View adventures as mini treasure hunts, attempting to come up with the most obscure and faintly held memory of a place, to make my search for that location as difficult as possible. Earlier this year, I remembered a weird middle-school trip I took to somewhere in Georgia for what amounted to a national convention of nerdy kids. (Its official name was Academic Games.) I was twelve at the time, and all I recalled about the event was that it was held at some gigantic 4-H-type place in the woods and that I lost the fishing rod I had brought all the way from Pennsylvania when I was showing off for some girls. (My grip slipped while casting, and I accidentally chucked it into the lake.) Anyway, I found that place on Street View. The campground is just north of Eatonton, Georgia. My fishing rod is somewhere at the bottom of Rock Eagle Lake.

That was a tough one. It took me a while to find.

More recently, on a late night after a long day of writing, I picked a Street View target that was much simpler, so I could take a quick mental jaunt and then go to bed. I decided to check out a house I lived in during my late teens, and that my mother continued to live in until she passed away, unexpectedly, right around this time two years ago. I currently live 2,578 miles from that home, and I hadn’t been there since a few years before my mom died. I mainly wanted to see how the street and neighborhood had changed.

I started at the top of the street and worked my way down toward her house. The Google Maps car had apparently passed by on the most glorious of spring days. The sky, in the pictures, is a brilliant shade of blue. Yards teem with bright crimson Japanese maples and well-manicured shrubbery. As I moved the cursor down the street, I noticed all sorts of newly constructed picket fences that I’d never seen before. Trees had sprouted up in the yards of my former neighbors.

According to the Web site, the images had been taken in April of 2012, and I was glad to see that my old street was doing just fine. That was no great surprise, though; my mom lived on a suburban block in a middle-class neighborhood with lots of trees. What I saw was pretty much what I had expected to see.

When I reached my mother’s house, that all changed. First, I noticed that a gigantic American flag  had been affixed to the mailbox post at the corner of the driveway. That was new. Then I spotted the fire pit in the front yard that my mom and her husband, my stepfather, used for block parties, and the grill on the patio, and my mom’s car. And then there she was, out front, walking on the path that leads from the driveway to the home’s front door. My mom.

At first I was convinced that it couldn’t be her, that I was just seeing things. When’s the last time you’ve spotted someone you know on Google Maps? I never had. And my mother, besides, is no longer alive. It couldn’t be her.

That feeling passed quickly. Because it was her. In the photo, my mom is wearing a pair of black slacks and a floral-print blouse. Her hair is exactly as I always remember it. She’s carrying what appears to be a small grocery bag.

The confluence of emotions, when I registered what I was looking at, was unlike anything I had ever experienced—something akin to the simultaneous rush of a million overlapping feelings. There was joy, certainly—“Mom! I found you! Can you believe it?”—but also deep, deep sadness. There was heartbreak and hurt, curiosity and wonder, and everything, seemingly, in between.

I cried for a minute. Then I chuckled. I shook my head. It was as though my mind and body had no clue how to appropriately respond, so I was made to do a little bit of everything all at once. But almost immediately I realized how fortunate I was to have made the discovery: at some point in the future, and probably quite soon, Google will update the pictures of my mom’s old street, and those images of her will disappear from the Internet.

I bit my lip and started clicking around. By moving the camera position up and down the street, and using the zoom function, I could trace my mom’s movements on that day as the Google car drove by. In the first frame, she’s a few paces from the door, with her back to the street; she was probably just returning from work. Then she veers from the path, toward the neighbor’s house—you can see, in another photo, that neighbor out front, picking up a newspaper; I’m pretty certain my mom briefly stopped to say hello. Then, in the next couple of frames, she reaches the front door, opens it, and goes inside. In that last one, you can barely see my mom, as the door closes behind her.

It took me a while to fall asleep that night, and the whole next day I walked around in a daze. All I could think about was my mom. It was impossible to concentrate on anything else for more than a few moments. Reeling, I shared the experience with a close friend, a woman who, unlike me, is quite religious, and who lost her father to cancer a few years ago. She had helped me get through the pain and sorrow I felt after my mom died. When my friend heard about the Street View discovery, she was thrilled. “These things happen,” she told me. “And they’ll sneak up on you at the oddest times.” She said she calls unexpected connections with lost loved ones “winks,” and that they happen to her often. Certain songs will come on the radio when she is thinking of her father, or she’ll find something on the beach with his initials on it, stuff like that. I don’t generally think about things in the intensely spiritual way this friend does, but finding these Google Maps photos of my mother felt like a wink of monumental proportions.

It is now a few weeks later, and that late-night discovery still occupies my mind for long stretches of each day. It has also prompted me to pay more attention to the expanding, multifaceted role technology plays in the experience of grief. Facebook is awash in memorials and posts paying tribute to deceased loved ones, of course, and scores of Web sites are in the online obituary business. But in most instances, people have to seek out that content in one way or another. It doesn’t sneak up on you. Not so for the ambush-style online reminders that began arriving shortly after my mom’s death and still throw me for a loop every single time.

Each year, I receive automated Facebook reminders urging me not to forget to wish my mom a happy birthday. During the weeks leading up to Mother’s Day, the flower company FTD, without fail, sends between five and ten e-mails to my old Yahoo account telling me that I should not wait any longer before ordering flowers for mom. I didn’t even realize that my mother had joined LinkedIn until January 2nd of this year, when I received one of those maddening, computer-generated e-mails informing me that her job anniversary was coming up.

These fleeting online occurrences can make an already difficult grieving process even more complicated and bizarre—mainly because it’s more difficult than you might expect to decide, finally, what to make of these things, or what to do about them. My Street View discovery was the best, but it was also the worst. Those Facebook pings about my deceased mom’s birthday bother me, but I don’t think I’d want them to go away forever.

In some ways, these sorrowful little blips feel like a reboot of an old, low-tech phenomenon: the way that, after the loss of a loved one, people pop up at every turn to either ask you how you are doing or urge you to “think of all the good times.”

At my mom’s funeral, several people I hadn’t seen in years, or barely knew, came up to me and, mid-hug, said things like, “Do you remember that time we all went to such-and-such place together?” or “Remember when your mom said such-and-such, and it was just so wonderful?” In each case, I did remember the times being referenced, and for the most part I was happy to have been reminded of them. They also made the sadness hit even harder, though, and interactions like that continue for weeks after someone close to you dies.

The unexpected tech taps I’ve experienced during the past few years feel similarly welcome and unwelcome, heartwarming and grief exacerbating, much appreciated and yet still somehow pretty terrible.

If you were to ask me right now whether I’m looking forward to receiving the e-mails that are sure to appear in my inbox during the first few weeks of December, inquiring whether I’d like to send another holiday wreath to my mom this year, or whether my mother might want another framed photo from Art.com, I would answer without any hedging or hesitation: absolutely not.

But, truth be told, when those e-mails arrive, in addition to becoming very sad, I will also be reminded of my mom, and will be glad for that. Until those branded mortality reminders start rolling in, later this year, I’ll still have the Miracle on Google Street View to recall. I took screenshots of my mom from every angle available on the site, saved them to my hard drive, and e-mailed copies to myself, just in case my hard drive crashes at some point. Then, like a living, breathing grief-complicating cliché, I e-mailed the images to family and friends, in order to simultaneously brighten and ruin their days.