The Man Live-Tweeting His Own Death
I thought it was a bot, at first. Someone taking a coding bootcamp, learning Python or something, was scraping obscure primary source documents from an 18th-century Catholic missionary. But then I see an undeniably modern phrase such as, “Our Lord seems to have gone awol” and I am jolted into understanding.
This twitter, which is a feed mostly of Catholic clergy retweets and short prayers, is not a bot at all, but a very real man facing the very real experience of living: death. Stuart R (@AugustineSDR) writes in his bio that he is a Catholic convert, a former clergy member with the Church of Scotland, and also dying of esophageal cancer. In between papal retweets, Catholic-core aesthetic images, and petitions to God, he tweets out “Dying Updates.” These are extraordinarily profound.
The imperative to “have a philosophy of death” is sort of Bataille-ian, no? Only this tweet hits harder than any Bataille I’ve ever read by virtue of being non-theoretical, but instead totally concrete and real.
Publicly suffering on the internet is one thing, documenting the last days of one’s life in a journal (with the intent for it to either never be read, or published posthumously) is another thing, but to combine both of these things is transcendent. The suffering he describes is extremely sensual. Not in a desirable way at all, but in the sort of way that makes the reader painfully aware of her body. And supremely grateful for good health.
In today’s internet this distinct kind of corporeal consciousness is welcome. It might just be me and the algorithms that know that I’m a healthy adult woman, but it seems that any social media concerned with the body is around how to make it beautiful, re-defining beauty, or maintaining health and wellness. Now @AugustineSDR’s channel is not the first or the only account documenting a battle with cancer, but it IS the first account that plainly accepts the destiny and does so with brutally matter-of-fact candor. Navigating social media accounts and GoFundMe’s pleading for support for an ailing patient sometimes feels like a perverse sideshow, replete with parents putting their congenitally-diseased children on full display (against their will, most likely) to garner views and sympathy, or spouses going to desperate measures pushing out visually jarring content in exchange for larger sums of monetary contributions in hopes that their upcoming bereavement won’t also be burdened in mountains of medical debt.
Another distinguishing element is @AugustineSDR’s spirituality. Again, he’s not the only account on the internet to be offering his suffering and life to God, but he does so in a distinctly humble manner. It also feels as though this is the moment he's been waiting for—indeed, isn’t it the moment we all wait for from the moment we’re born?—and he treats the experience as an honor. In his prayers it is as though he has attained a spiritual enlightenment that one can grasp at, but never fully understand until the time comes.
I don’t believe that when @AugustineSDR’s time finally comes there will be any family member who’ll take over his social media accounts. In a strangely allegorical way, his followers will wake up one day to an absence of his tweets and retweets, the same way he’ll wake up dead, so to speak.
Outstanding post. What a telling image.
Another amazing read Bethany, and I really appreciated this piece, which I think can help one consider this Ultimate Issue. All together, your pieces always focus on some of the most fascinating developments regarding our society and its intersections with spirituality. For that, I commend you.