On Death and Dying, and One Extremely Long Text Exchange

For years the writer and an old friend sent each other the names of famous people who had just died. It felt like a game—until it didn’t.

By Sloane Crosley

May 27, 2020

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In 2008, I was on the phone with my friend’s younger brother when the news broke that Tim Russert had died. I didn’t have much of a relationship with my friend’s younger brother and can’t remember why we were on the phone in the first place. Perhaps we were planning a surprise party. Perhaps an intervention. Perhaps both.

“Oh, man,” Jack interrupted himself, “Tim Russert just died.”

“For the rest of my life,” I said, “You’ll be the one who told me that.”

About a week later, Jack’s name appeared on my screen, followed by the words George Carlin. Bernie Mac, I fired back. This is how the game began, innocently enough. This is also, somewhat miraculously, how it continued. For the past 12 years, every time a person of note has died, the two of us have raced to our phones. It is not the basis of our friendship. It is the entire friendship.

Visualize, if you will, what this looks like. More than a decade’s worth of two-word bubbles, staggered vertically like a video game ladder. We do not take joy in the deaths, nor do we fetishize or mourn them. We’re simply transferring names from one list to another. There are exceptions, such as the time we simultaneously texted each other Michael Jackson and argued about it. Or the time Jack wrote Carrie Fisher and I stopped short in the street and told him so. He didn’t know how to respond. The text exchange is not built for pathos, for treating celebrities like people. Perhaps the most chilling was Philip Seymour Hoffman. I’d met Hoffman at a Christmas party, where we shared a cigarette by an open window and he told me about a running joke he had with a friend. Wanting to amuse him, I took out my phone. He scrolled through the texts, using the fingers unoccupied by the cigarette, and laughed. A month later, I woke up to his name.

Twelve years is a long time for a text thread. Do we feel guilty about minimizing humanity for our own creepy amusement? It’s not like we’re selling it. We’re not paparazzi. Ours is a macabre piece of performance art for two. Though I sometimes wonder if we’ve managed to teach ourselves anything about anonymity versus fame. Sure doesn’t seem like it. The game’s counterintuitive mix of laziness and competition mimics the feeling of being on Twitter, which is also not an educational tool. We’ve played with the form (democracy, irony, disco, my youth, your youth) but really it was just the names of recently deceased celebrities. Was.

On March 11, I decided to start from scratch with a tacit set of criteria:

Tom Hanks

Rita Wilson

That’s cheating

And we’re off to the races. Life outside the exchange is a never-ending procession of heartbreaking realities and depressing scenarios. Jack lives in Los Angeles, I live in Manhattan. We are surrounded. Sirens moan as if trying to make a point and we’re not listening. Okay, they say, maybe a little louder then. Doors that were once closed in caution remain propped open in caution. At minimum, the world has learned it’s possible to be homesick for the exact place in which you’re trapped. But by the time this year is over, none of us will have gotten away with “at minimum.” In the meantime, we’re told it’s helpful to maintain patterns, to develop hobbies. Some people make sourdough starters. Some do jigsaw puzzles. Jack and I do this.

Except something is off. No longer an empty ceremony, the new names do not vanish from our minds after we press Send. The sick are somehow worse than the dead because they are inseparable from our daily thoughts. We were, in some abstract way, already thinking about them. We’re all hooked up to the same illness mainframe. Many of these people will recover or already have, but each name represents more than itself, thereby shedding its expensively perfumed skin. We only know they’re sick because of their access to testing, money, and media, but we cannot help but extrapolate percentages. This is part of the newfound utility of our enterprise. Right now, the days are bleeding together, but in the future I will have my memory jogged by time stamps. I will note the rash of political figures (Sophie Trudeau, Boris Johnson, probably Bolsonaro) who comprised the first wave.

This iteration also unearths personal questions for the first time: What will we do when it’s one of the people we know in common? When it’s a parent? What will we do when one of us texts the other me? I don’t know. I know we are trying to outsmart our trauma by throwing a familiar stick at it, but the trauma keeps returning, dropping more fancy names at our feet.

Much has been made of the rickety nature of celebrity culture in this moment, the mascot of which has become Gal Gadot’s fauxspirational “Imagine” video, aka the pop equivalent of Trump’s CEO-laden address to a shaken nation. This is the kind of thing that deserves to be filleted so long as we have the energy. But the mass celebrity berating also reminds me of a question with which we used to concern ourselves: What should be done with the children of famous actors? Should these talented youngsters be denied because of their parents? If the answer to this type of question before was “kinda,” the answer now is “oh, definitely.”

The rules are clear: Civilians get to telegraph whatever nonsense makes us feel better in the face of disaster because we already have a citizen’s arrest-style system in place for peer-to-peer self-promotion. Famous rich people have had their right to this indulgence revoked. Maybe that’s not fair. They too are experiencing a sense of dread that must feel very real to them. But the smart ones are staying quiet. Or at least avoiding wide shots of the lawn.

The text exchange slips through all that. It provides Jack and me with a customary hit of frivolity while being recused from the celebrity conversation. Even though it is only about famous people, we offer no commentary. Their driver’s licenses are more salacious. We don’t care what they do. During this horrible time that none of us can yet name (is it an age? An epoch? A year of?), celebrities are closer to being faceless statistics than they’ve ever been. To some, this clearly smacks of demotion. Perhaps it is. But what I do know is that a game that used to make them less human now makes them more so.

In two decades of New York life, I have personally witnessed a citywide mind meld only three times. These are days when every disparate pair of eyes has the same set of thoughts behind them. The first was after 9/11, the second was after Obama won, and the third was after Hillary lost. Giddy or devastated, each instance was a rare phenomenon. This is the fourth. And what I wouldn’t give for a little ignorance about what my neighbors are thinking. We are all grasping for familiarity, for context. The virus is like the Berlin Wall, erected quickly and separating or imprisoning families. The virus is like Vesuvius over Pompeii, petrifying our lives wherever they stood. The virus is like…nothing. It is like nothing we think we know, this plague on our modern world. We have no comparisons. And yet, superficial as it may be, we still have these famous faces, milling about their gleaming kitchens.

Idris Elba, Jack writes me as I write this.

This is how we will keep track, I think, in this virtual space that, like so many spaces, has been repurposed for an emergency.

As I scroll through the text exchange, I am reminded of a line from a dark short story called “River of Names” by Dorothy Allison: “We were so many we were without number and, like tadpoles, if there was one less from time to time, who counted?” Who counted? Our game may be glib, but we are counting. Governments may minimize the statistics but we are counting. We are staring at the smooth marble of a massive family headstone, meeting our reflection in the blank space. We know that a text exchange is no memorial. Repurposing has its limits. But what it does have going for it is all the room in the world. As many names as you like, as many names as you know. Until, one very fine day, when we can start over.

Sloane Crosley

Royal Watch