Raiding Eternity

My latest piece on Gizmodo, which is one of my favorites:

“Lots of times the families will go down to Kinko’s,” the funeral director tells me. “They can do a memorial folder thing down there.” Do you help them get photos off Flickr, off Facebook? “We don’t really help with that.”

* * *
The old woman looks up from her brush pile. “My husband has to redo that roof every year.” Her husband is crawling around their roof, sweeping pine needles from the angles to the ground below. “We’ve been here fifty years. You see these two pines?” They’re impossible to miss, at least eighty feet tall. “When we moved in to this house we planted those.”

* * *
The second of June, a couple of years back. A 27-year-old man is biking in downtown Eugene, Oregon. David’s a clumsy, funny man. Easy to love. Lived here his whole life. He’s unsure of what he’s going to do with his Bachelor’s in Environmental Studies—maybe become an activist?—but for now he’s managing this restaurant that also does live music and maybe it’s not what he wants to do forever, but it’s pretty great right now.

He turns on to 13th & Willamette, but so does the woman in the car.