Facebook chronicles: Tragic, twisted life of ‘The Uxorcist’

I am a Facebook voyeur, and I have been guilty of shameless schadenfreude.

Several years ago, I got a friend request from a man I didn’t know, but we had friends in common, so I accepted. All I knew is that he was a widower in his late 70s. He sent me a nice message. But after a few months of seeing his posts, I became morbidly fascinated by what his posts revealed.

First of all, he’s a Trumper. This tells you all you really need to know. He is a knee-jerk patriot who glorifies the military. (He was still furious with “Hanoi Jane.”) He also likes to declare, about his long marriage, that “we were blessed.” The level of self-satisfaction that phrase conveys really chaps me.

But most of all, he repeatedly puts up the same   pictures of his late wife, whom he always describes as “gorgeous.” But she wasn’t! She had bad teeth, thin lips, squinty eyes, and aggressively dyed red hair. (Meow.) Worst of all, she wore a permanent expression of complacency. I disliked her on sight, and at that time she had already joined the choir invisible. Not the classiest behavior on my part, but the story kept getting better. I was hooked.

A few months later, this friend, whom I’ll call Sherman, posted childhood pictures of his kids. I had no idea he had any. He went on to post the same elementary-school pictures from the same year over and over–rarely any casual snapshots that captured family fun. I wonder if there were any. He mostly just posted pics of his adored spouse. He never reminisced about his kids as little babies, just recited their degrees and salaries and the size of their homes. I

In the scant photos available from anniversaries and such, no one is smiling except Sherman’s wife. The rest of the clan looks posed and uncomfortable. (NB: I admit, dysfunction is always easier to spot in someone else’s family.)

In search of ‘The Uxorcist’

I dubbed Sherman “the Uxorcist.” Because he was widowed, and had lost his one true love, his self-pity knew no bounds, and he posted almost daily about the pain of the “grief process” and the utter injustice of his wife’s dying. A typical comment was “Nothing is worse than losing a loving spouse of fifty years.” Yeah, there is. I felt sorry for him, but his attitude was annoying. Even after years, he had zero insight. 

Then, in May, Sherman abruptly quit posting. Soon his real-life friends started investigating and left “Are you okay?” messages on Facebook. He never replied. The obvious answer was the right one. But it turns out that he didn’t just up and die. He was very sick for a while, and then died at home–but his body wasn’t found for 12 days.

It’s a terrible visual. No one in the family, or anywhere else, was staying in touch with him. His kids arranged a private burial. They apparently did not write an obituary (there’s nothing online) and did not tell his siblings, cousins, or friends that he was dead. I can’t fault the kids. We don’t know what their childhood was like. But Sherman surely rued his parental neglect in his final days.

All these unverified facts come from distraught comments on one of his last posts, as does this final nugget, from a sad relative: Sherman abandoned his own family when he got married in the sixties, and he never attempted to reconcile or to heal the breach.

Anyway, Sherman is gone. I feel like I just watched the final episode of a dark Netflix show.

Anne Dingus is a former writer and editor at Texas Monthly.