NPR Host Tweets His Mom's Death

Tweeting his mother's death to a million

 John Timpane, Inquirer Staff Writer LAST UPDATED: Wednesday, July 31, 2013, 1:08 AM It was a sad, humble, spectacular performance. Before 1.2 million people, a man told of the passing of his mother, step by step, day by day. He told this most human of stories in bursts of 140 characters, on Twitter, the microblogging site. The storyteller was Scott Simon, National Public Radio host. On July 16, he first mentioned his mother's crisis in the ICU of an undisclosed Chicago hospital ("Mother called: 'I can't talk. I'm surrounded by handsome men.' Emergency surgery. If you can hold a thought for her now. . . . "). Starting July 23, his tweets ("I just want to say that ICU nurses are remarkable people. Thank you for what you do for our loved ones") focused solely on her passing. Simon's tweets are marked by humane dignity, understatement, openness ("I love holding my mother's hand. Haven't held it like this since I was 9. Why did I stop? I thought it unmanly? What crap"), and humor about death ("But as my mother said, the nice thing about being a Chicagoan is that she'll continue to be able to vote on Election Day"). Other tweeters have done similar things, but probably none has been so much in the public eye. Big celebs (Katie Couric) and venues (AARP, Buzzfeed, NBC's Today, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times) either retweeted or wrote about it. Simon's entire feed viralized. Monday night he wrote, "The heavens over Chicago have opened and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped onstage." He repurposed a couplet from Romeo and Juliet: "She will make the face of heaven shine so fine that all the world will be in love with night." Twitter responded with condolences and appreciation. Twitter, Facebook, and other social media - even largely nonverbal Instagram, which is all about photos - invite us to be storytellers around imaginary campfires, ringed with friends, acquaintances, and family. Have these media changed storytelling itself? Depends on whom you ask. John Beatty, associate professor of English and digital arts at La Salle University, does see novel techniques. "When Scott runs over 140 characters, he simply runs over into the next tweet." Steve Buttry, digital transformation editor at Digital First Media, tweeted on his nephew's death in Afghanistan in November. He writes by e-mail that a Twitter narration "doesn't flow the same as a string of paragraphs artfully crafted by an excellent writer. Just as an audio or video story isn't the same. But Twitter is a powerful storytelling platform and few have used it as well as Simon did in his mother's final days." Mallary Jean Tenore of the Poynter Institute writes (via Twitter) that "the storytelling's different in that it's more succinct. Every word counts. . . . Twitter can go a long way in teaching us how to write short & well." Robert McKee, far-famed story doctor, is head of Robert McKee's Story Seminar. "Curmudgeon that I am," he says by phone, "I see Twitter not as a revolution in communication but a revolution in banality." He is skeptical about its chances as a storytelling medium. "Storytelling is a temporal art," he says. "Telling a tale through tweets is the equivalent of a ballet dancer coming onstage and doing a single pirouette and leaving, or a musician hitting a single chord and leaving." It can't be said that Simon's account is short on emotion ("Thought that my mother won't get another glimpse of the city she loves is unbearable"). Margaret Low Smith, senior vice president for news at NPR, sees the happy/sad tweets as an extension of Simon's essays on Weekend Edition, "only one sentence at a time. He's always had this gift of walking the delicate line between humor and heartbreak." But was it right? Seemly? To share with so many such an intense, sacred story? Some would rather that Simon's grief and his mother's death had remained private. Janine Mariscotti, assistant professor of social work at La Salle University, says "it's still socially inappropriate in the United States to spend a long time talking about the process of dying, as Scott does." But Mary Elizabeth Williams of Salon says that "life is no longer either or public or private." She feels Simon's story "loses none of that intimate power just because it was doled out a few hundred characters at a time, while a few million people watched." (For his part, Simon said in an NPR interview on Tuesday that "I certainly had a sense of proportion and delicacy. . . . I didn't tweet anything and wouldn't have that I didn't think she would be totally comfortable with.") Mariscotti says Simon's tweets probably had a therapeutic effect for both writer and readers. "Dying is so mysterious, and some of his tweets, such as the one in which his mother cries, 'Help me,' in the middle of the night, give us a glimpse into it. Plus we get to see the mother-son relationship. Scott even challenges our seriousness, with his humor." In her Poynter blog, Tenore writes that attitudes have changed. In 2008, Berny Morson of the Rocky Mountain News tweeted from a funeral and was reviled as "repulsive." These days, it happens all the time. The coarsening of American culture? A way to expand the sharing circle? Depends on whom you ask. There appeared to be fewer objections to the propriety of Simon's tweets Tuesday than questions about their authenticity. "People online are on their guard for things that are too well-turned," says Beatty, "almost as if professionalism is the opposite of being real. But with Simon, you have a guy who can probably generate a well-turned tweet pretty much on the fly." Meanwhile, Simon keeps tweeting. Now he's dealing with the comic aspects of mortuary science: "Cemetery at first confuses my mother w/ another Patricia. Almost interred next to total stranger. Why not make new friends?"
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