The Day I Discovered My Grandpa is a Meme
What would you do if you woke up one day to find out a deceased family member had gone viral?
I don't think I'll ever forget the morning of February 13, 2016. Not for any romantic Valentine's Day weekend plans, although there were some, but because it was the day I discovered that my grandpa, Pat Cooper, had become a minor internet meme.
I remember fuzzily rolling over in bed that morning, and reaching for my phone to check Facebook, hopeless addict that I am. Scrolling sleepily through my newsfeed, one article from ScienceAlert.com that my best friend had posted caught my eye – not because it was on an interesting subject, although it was, but because there above the title, smiling cheerily back at me, was my deceased grandfather. Suddenly wide awake I shot up to sitting, blurting out, "OH MY GOD!" and just about giving my poor sleeping fiancée a heart attack. I jumped out of bed and immediately called my mom, the youngest of my grandpa's four kids, and sent her a link.
It turns out that in 2006, a very nice photographer that goes by the flickr handle torbakhopper ran into my grandpa at the bottom of a set of stairs to the beach colloquially known as the "1,000 Steps." They were his favorite place in the world, and he used to climb up and down them every day until he was 91 (I guess there's a reason Google image search's "best guess" for him is "healthy old man"). With the sense of kindness and humor that was his hallmark, he asked the photographer to take his picture. That same day torbakhopper posted the very nice photo on flickr under the title "The Old Man and the Sea," along with some very kind words about him, and proceeded to make it open-source, meaning anyone can use it. Then, 10 years later, it reached me, and I traced it back to torbakhopper because ScienceAlert.com gave proper credit and a link.
The rest of that morning was spent scrolling through what seemed like endless pages from all over the world, dealing with the shock of discovering that my grandpa's face was all over the internet. Most of the ways his picture was used were sweet (he's the picture for "F is for Friendly" at PhotographicDictionary.com), and some of the ways his picture was used were laughable, but also slightly disturbing. Most notable was an "obituary" claiming that he was Donald Trump's cousin and using language my highly religious grandfather would be horrified at reading, let alone saying. It has now gone viral on Twitter, with the liars who originally posted it having garnered nearly 2.2K "likes" and the post earning its own Snopes page. (By the way - hey, Uncle Donald, could I trouble you for a small $1 million loan?) Here's a link to my grandpa's real obituary, by the way. A close second was a "review" for an assisted living facility on the other side of the country claiming his name was Robert and that he was "overly satisfied" with their services. I'm pretty sure he never put the words "overly satisfied" together in sentence in his 92 years of existence.
Ultimately, I think my grandpa would find his internet "fame" highly amusing, and it is kind of a cool way for him to find immortality. On the other hand, I think the rest of us could take a lesson from this. If you give your consent for someone to take your picture, there's nothing stopping them from doing what torbakhopper did and posting it open-source to anyone who wants to use it, for whatever purpose. I'm not saying I'm upset about any of this. The photographer is a very nice person and clearly didn't intend for things to get as crazy as they have. But imagine it was a young woman instead of an old man. Do you think she would be the cover girl for "F is for Friendly?" Not likely. Not that kind of friendly, anyway. So unless you're a 91-year-old man, be careful who takes your picture. You never know what they'll do with it.
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