June 16, 2012
I joined Facebook on August 16, 2008, not long after Facebook expanded beyond just college students. I joined with the expectation of staying “connected” to my son and daughter who were both away at college. It was a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided objective. My wife and I had raised two kids who were wise enough not to get into too much trouble, and who were shrewd enough to share only the PG-13 versions of their lives on Facebook. (Win-win.) Although I remained on Facebook, I assiduously stayed out of their business and relied on more conventional ways of staying “connected.”
One month in, I was now on Facebook without a flight plan. Like standing in the middle of a store without a shopping list or any particular reason to be there. I browsed. Tentatively. Warily. I had always been comfortable with the internet as a place for e-commerce, research and entertainment. I had been banking online since the 1980’s. But social media was a different animal, entirely new and unfamiliar to me. Meeting people online always seemed like the kind of thing reserved for desperate lonely hearts and pedophiles.
Somehow I stumbled upon a Facebook thread where several people were reviewing and discussing whether a new promotional ad from Subway was racist. As a 30 year advertising veteran and someone passionate about multicultural marketing and diversity in our industry, the topic and the conversation were irresistible to me. I posted a comment. The person who originated and moderated this conversation was a woman named Erica. It is no exaggeration at all to say from that moment forward my world changed.
I have already used the word “connected” too often in this piece, but I struggle for a better word. Meeting Erica changed the way I created connections with other people, changed the way I perceived and understood that matrix of connectivity. There was a looking glass in front of me. And she stood on the other side, beckoning. Erica strode across the virtual room, walked up to me, extended her hand, smiling, and introduced herself. It was the first of many times that I felt – literally – her hand in mine. Not in any romantic way. Far, far from it. Again, that word. Connected.
She wanted to know my background; what history and experience I brought to the topic. I felt as if I were being interviewed by Barbara Walters, except that in the end she said, “We should do this together. We should bring people together to talk about advertising and marketing images and how we perceive their success or failure.” Erica had morphed from gracious host to interrogator to co-conspirator before I could catch my breath. And on October 21, 2008, she became my very first “Facebook friend”; the first person I had not known prior to Facebook whom I “friended.”
For months we critiqued dozens of marketing campaigns, dissecting images and parsing headlines. She brought the posse of hyper-engaged interlocutors. I brought the big mouth full of opinions shaped by years in the ad business and my own oddball perspective. It was the most intellectually stimulating fun I’d had in years. We had built a virtual salon. She had built a virtual salon. I merely showed up.
Erica knew everyone, but more than that, she had bonded to everyone. She was the anti-Teflon. A single interaction bonded you to Erica. And she was a master of human Mah-Jong. She could glance at a sea of hundreds of her friends and instantly know that she needed to bring this person and that person together. She could read your DNA and effortlessly find a match; someone else you would want to know, someone you would instantly befriend. Erica was blessed with many gifts; beauty, intellect, charm, her talent for writing. But her greatest gift was this Mah-Jong thing. Some of my best and dearest friends today, not just in the virtual Facebook world, but in the corporeal world of drinks and dinners and hugs and smiles, are people that I would never have known if not for Erica. If not for Erica, I would never have known Nancy or Nyree or Denitria or Shawn or Sarah, or many others. I think about how much emptier my life would be without these friends.
I think about how empty my life would be without Erica.
Over the next four years there were times when we fell out of touch with each other. Erica had an uncharacteristic (irrational) fan infatuation with Madonna (and a few other strong female artists) and I would tease her mercilessly about it. She was not amused. But after months had passed, she would send me a note as though we had spoken the day before. She was an occasional muse for my own writing and often prodded (and poked and nagged) me to write for Huff Post. These were times when I felt especially close; when I felt encouraged, understood. When I felt her hand in mine. From time to time she would share small pieces of her personal life, but not much. Our relationship was – on some level – intellectually intimate, but never personal. I don’t know how else to explain or describe it.
And so, yesterday morning when a former co-worker sent me a message asking if I knew that Erica Johnson had passed away, I casually replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is.” It wasn’t until the end of the day, when I returned home from work and saw a second message saying, “You know her as Erica Kennedy.” All the air left my lungs.
That’s exactly how I felt; like a balloon after all the air had escaped.
I have read the many, many postings to Facebook about Erica; the words of genuine affection, the words of shock and grief and the palpable sense of great, collective loss. Erica is not simply a missing element in our shared ecosystem of friends. Erica was the ecosystem, the taproot. And just as my world had changed when I met Erica, it changes now, in a disorienting Doppler effect triggered by her departure.
I could never have imagined that I would feel her loss as deeply as I do. That was not our relationship. In the four years that I have known Erica, we have never once met. We have never actually laid eyes on each other. That might seem odd or surprising to others. Not to me. She was my Facebook friend. I will miss her more than these words can express.
I close instead with words from a poem that Erica had posted to her Facebook page, words that artfully describe the purity of her spirit, the clarity of her purpose:
Even after all this time, The sun never says to the earth, "You owe me." Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.
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