I’m blurring the lines here a little to integrate technology into my art space today, in order to give some page space to one thing that’s had me all wrapped up all week: my friends’ baby died.

I’m not particularly close with Matt or Ellen, but we are well past merely acquainted. Ellen and I are, anyway. Matt I’ve known peripherally at best, through Ellen and our overlapping social circles. When Ellen started trying to help me get a job, Matt took my resume and circulated it on my behalf, too (thanks, Matt!). I joined Ellen for lunch at work in late spring of 2007, and over cafeteria vittles she glowingly told me that, after trying for a long time, she was pretty sure she was finally pregnant! Through the summer, I kept up with the Kowalczyks, had conversations with Ellen on the phone and in person, she helped me rework my resume and coached me on getting a job. The last time I saw her before the girls were born, she was 28 weeks pregnant, on bed rest, and thrilled to bits to be gestating these little ones. Ellen took the high-risk pregnancy in stride, and said, ‘it’s not about me anymore’. She was happy.

Ella and Emma were born November 10 2007 at 29 weeks’ gestation. The girls had a condition called TTTS, which basically means that they shared a placenta, and one got the short end of things most of the time. That was Emma. She had a really rough go of it- she endured in-vitro blood transfusions (!), was on and off multiple machines, had heart surgery in March of this year, and in the end tried and failed to resist sepsis. She fought and fought, but her little body just couldn’t take any more.

The technology isn’t exactly new, but the package is- Twitter. While in the hospital with the girls, Matt posted regularly on Twitter. His updates helped to keep him feeling connected to the outside world, but they achieved more than just that. They also served to catch the rest of us up on Emma’s progress. Her struggles, her victories- all of these happened in my pocket, close to my heart. From a distance, we were able to keep tabs on the family, sending prayers when asked, and singing along to Yellow Submarine when Matt shared Emma’s joy at the music. We could send private messages of love and support, and Matt and Ellen didn’t have to tell the same stories to a hundred people- we all got the messages, real-time, en masse. And when the unthinkable occurred at 5PM last Sunday, and another friend tweeted at that moment that there was a rainbow over lake Washington, I knew then that Emma had passed away, even though the word didn’t surface for another couple of hours.

In this age of rushing and impersonal interactions, where folks would rather send email than sit down and lunch together, Twitter has brought something to the forefront, something that writer Lisa Reichelt calls ‘ambient intimacy’ Of a day’s worth of text messages- not a single one of them means particularly anything, but the effect of little blurbs over the course of a day creates a knowledge of someone’s environment to a different depth than we’ve ever known before. It’s like small talk for the internet. And, as any hostess will tell you, it’s small talk that holds a good party together.

The only time I ever met Emma was through the walls of her mother’s belly. All week I’ve felt her presence in my life, not directly but through friends who feel her presence and share with me what they feel. I am grateful for this feeling of connection.