More about Kirsten Malone

Posted July 2nd, 2004 by Tim

The Neighborhood

I seem to keep crossing paths with Kirsten Malone, even through I've never met her and, sadly, she's no longer alive. I mentioned passing her memorial a couple weeks ago but at that point I didn't anything about her. On Wednesday I discovered that my colleague Jeanne and her husband were friends of hers (David actually dated her for a time and appears on Kirsten's very funny Love Resume. After passing her neighhorhood memorial serveral times and reading the links Jeanne sent me, she's beginning to feel like a neighbor who I just missed meeting.

Jeanne pointed me to another obituary, a photo gallery, a memorial site, and a discussion board thread that documents the first announcement of her accident through her death (a page that has been visited over 9000 times in the last couple weeks). These sites remind me of Joyce Walker's dissertation project, Standing at the end of a road: Death and the construction of cyborg relationships, which examined the phenomenon of online memorials, like the ones on http://virtual-memorials.com/:

Standing at the End of a Road works to explore the intersections of bereavement rituals with the technologies and tools of new digital media. The research includes rhetorical analyses of the remediation of funerary practices through relationships with digital media, and case studies of various types of memorial web sites, including individually created sites, various free and commercial sites for constructing and posting memorials, and sites created to commemorate the September 11th tragedy.

Her project won the dissertation prize at the Computers and Writing conference this year.

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I feel like you do...

On July 22nd, 2004 Visitor commented:

I never met her. I learned about her by first driving by her memorial at the end of the foot bridge. I didn't know who the memorial was for, but it was obvious what had happened there. That same day, I came across a copy of the Weekly Dig at the Common Ground. As soon as I saw her picture, I started to cry because I knew the memorial was for her. I read the story with a weird sense of hesitation. I knew how the story ended and I almost felt that if I didn't finish reading it, it wouldn't be true. I didn't even know this woman's name, but her death affected me.

For some reason, I keep bumping into her as well. Articles, photographs, links...this website. She was my neighbor and I never even knew she was there until she wasn't there anymore.