While sorting through some papers, I found a questionnaire my late husband did for his last therapist. It wasn’t something I had seen before. We talked about his concerns and his therapy, but I generally didn’t pry and he didn’t volunteer things like this questionnaire. I glanced at it, but felt that I was invading his privacy despite his subsequent death.
Do the dead still have privacy? Would you feel funny looking at something personal that wasn’t shared with you while the person was alive? Does it just depend on what it is and what your relationship was? Can you share the things you find with others? Is it a free-for-all once the person has died?
I guess it depends on your relationship to the individual and whether or not it would hurt their family.
To be completely honest, if a close family member of mine died, such as a parent or a spouse, I would probably go through and read stuff like that. I’ve read my mom’s blog which I found by just googling her name, and she’s still alive (I didn’t tell her obviously). I guess the risk is that you may find out something potentially hurtful (i.e. the daughter who finds out after the funeral that her parents had always wanted a son, or the spouse who finds out the other one was a chronic cheater).
I wouldn’t use it as a free for all though. Obviously the dead can’t be embarrassed, but their friends and family can, and even though it won’t hurt the dead individual per se, I think it does still show a lack of respect to reveal all their secrets upon death.
But I do think it’s interesting to read private and personal things about historical figures…I think the difference there is, those details were revealed long after anyone who could get hurt was also dead.
After my mother died, I was the one who found the journal she kept during her final illness. As she got sicker, she started writing strange, vituperative (and demonstrably false) rants about everyone in the family. I told my sisters they’d be better off not reading it, and they agreed to let me destroy it.
I would never, EVER want my stuff to become a “free for all” after I die.
My mom probably didn’t realize I could find it or think I would look…she doesn’t think a lot of things through. Also, she wrote stuff about her divorce, about me, etc. that I’m guessing she wouldn’t want me to know. And yes, putting it on a public blog was stupid of her, but the blog’s gone, so maybe she figured it out.
This actually came up in a big way for my family, when my stepbrother decided to make a film after the death of his grandmother. Now, she left a big envelope of notes, and written on it in her handwriting was “Must read after my death”. So, obviously, she wanted someone to read it. What’s not entirely clear is who she wanted to read it, or why, or how much she wanted shared outside the family.
There was lots of family debate about that, especially when my stepbrother decided to make a film directly out of her old movies and audio recordings, not using actors or fictionalizing. Not only was there Allis’ (the dead grandmother) privacy to consider, but the privacy of the very alive and well now grown children. How do you tell one person’s story without telling others? How can you violate the privacy of only one person when all of our stories are interconnected?
In the end, Morgan did make the film, with the blessing, more or less, of the surviving people featured in it. But he did leave off Charley and Allis’ (and their kids’) last name, to protect the living.
Just because your relationship with the living person is now in the past doesn’t make it less real. If you wouldn’t invade the privacy of a living person when you knew they wouldn’t find out, there’s no basis for doing it to the dead.
That film looks really interesting. I obviously don’t know your family, but do you think if she cared that much about who read it, she would have specified in more detail?
Anyway, I think things like that are cool as long as everyone’s ok with it.
This makes me think of Atonment** and Briony writing her family’s story and having to wait until the death of her cousin (and inevitably her own death) to publish her novel.
Yes, they do need privacy for themselves but also for the effects that it could have on the still living. I had an uncle that committed suicide and his young daughter who I am still close to wasn’t ever supposed to know. Someone blabbed about that and a lot more after she was older. It caused a lot of damage to her and no good came from it.
I recently reconnected with a childhood friend on Facebook and it is almost the same situation. I don’t think she knows that her mother committed suicide over a lesbian love affair gone wrong after her parents got divorced and I am certainly not going to be the one to break that news. She was just a child when she was taken away suddenly from her hometown by her father and she can choose to remember her mother however she wants based on what she remembers.
No one needs to know everything about a person, even close family members. The hidden things are generally the most damaging ones.
The problem with some of the living keeping secrets from other living people about tragedies is that, eventually, many of these people will want to know, and will search. When they find out, they might well feel very betrayed by their loved ones that such secrets were kept from them.
Others might blurt out something completely by accident, especially if it’s not common knowledge that certain people shouldn’t be told, or if the person in question is around a corner or otherwise able to hear what’s being said.
I understand the impulse, but it has the potential to cause much harm.
I think reasons for privacy depend on the situation, of course, but most often boil down to simple embarrassment. Face it, most of what I keep “private” isn’t things like bank accounts and my password to the Dope (although I do keep them private). It’s the stuff I’d be embarrassed if people knew. The time that one thing I’m so ashamed of happened. Or that other time.
I think the dead do have a right to privacy. My leaning is not so much because I think the dead need protecting. I just don’t think that people who didn’t have a right to information when the person was living should suddenly gain such a right just because the person is no longer around to keep them away from the info.
The examples of children not being allowed to know about how their parents died really bother me, though. That’s not just a secret of the dead person. It is the story of how the individual lost his or her parent and why he or she grew up under certain circumstances. That’s a situation where I think the child (once an adult, at least) has every right to know.
My feelings about maintaining privacy are more about things like how I never told anyone how I had really hot sex on an train with a woman I’d just met, and we never learned each other’s names. That sort of thing IS my secret (and hers, I suppose – she probably totally blabbed about it, though).