My Grandmother in 140 characters.

I am the eldest grandaughter on both sides of my family, which has meant that I was lucky enough to spend 30 years with all four of my grandparents. Two years ago, my mom’s mother was diagnosed with Luekemia, and I knew that I would likely have to say my first goodbye. Indeed, a month ago, she finally lost the fight. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve known that I would soon be faced with the deaths of my grandparents, but losing a family member is never easy. Not only does the loss hurt, it also serves as a stark reminder of the inevitable passage of time and the fleeting nature of our own existence.

That being said, I’m not here to meditate on mourning or the ephemerality of life. I am here to celebrate a legacy that my grandmother left behind, a legacy that I was not aware of until we flew out to California for her funeral last month. I knew that my grandma was an award winning water color painter and an active member of the San Diego Jewish community. What I did not know is that she was also a prolific tweeter.

This was just one of the tweets featured in the sweet and funny video my aunt made for her memorial. I was mad at myself for not realizing that my grandma had been tweeting her thoughts and live-tweeting shows like The Colbert Report for years. I, of course, immediately set out to read her Twitter feed from beginning to end. Being able to read the past four years of my grandma’s thoughts, feelings, and opinions has given me some wonderful insight into what kind of a person she was. While we think of Twitter as an ephemeral form of media used mostly by the young, the feed my grandma left behind has allowed me to get to know her in an entirely new way.

My grandma could drive me crazy: she was blunt and spoke matter-of-factly. Though her advice was given out of love and concern, it could still sting. She once offered to buy me a J-Date membership, because I probably wouldn’t be happy until I was married.

She was also funny, smart, and opinionated. My mom likes to say that she was a feminist who didn’t necessarily call herself a feminist. She did not take crap from anyone and she was determined to make her views heard no matter what.

In other words, she was the quintessential Twitter user.

I remember vaguely hearing that my grandma had a Twitter handle, but I assumed she used it as my mom does — sparingly and only to read what others are doing. I’ve tried several times to get my mom to use Twitter to build her online presence as a personal trainer, but she’s convinced after reading several stories on Buzzfeed that anything she tweets may potentially go viral, bring trolls to her mentions, and wind up being the top story on The Today Show a year after everyone else has already heard about it. My mom uses technology because she feels like she’s being forced into it by society. She would be much happier without the internet, which she frequently tells me is making everyone miserable because people online spend their time trying to prove how much more clever they are than everybody else.

My grandmother, on the other hand, has always embraced technology. She was the first person in our family to get an iPhone; she may have been the first person I know to get an iPhone. As I learned from the illuminating obituary written by my grandfather, this was likely because while my grandfather served as a professor in Purdue University’s physics department, she worked on campus in various capacities for biologists and computer scientists. As he wrote,

“Her experiences in working among computer science people made her into a sort of mini-geek to her many friends who sought her advice on how to deal with all of the new-fangled digital-age contraptions that now clutter and complicate our lives.”

Not only was she technologically savvy, she was also an avid television viewer. My mom likes to tell me stories of how her family would get together to watch All in The Family and Mary Tyler Moore in the 70s. I probably inherited my affection for television from her. Most recently, she was a fan of everything from South Park and The Voice to Morning Joe and Melissa Harris-Perry. I found that a large part of her Twitter activity consisted of live-tweeting shows like The Daily Show on a regular basis. She used Twitter both to express her thoughts on the show and to talk directly to the hosts either to offer criticism,

or to express her approval and to tell them to keep up the good work.

Or, in one of my favorite series, to give the Big Bang Theory writers some recommendations:

and to stand up for Penny.

I knew that my grandma was fairly progressive, but going through her feed gave me even more insight into her political, social and economic views. Being Jewish, she worried about Israel and the Middle East. Having spent most of her adult life married to a professor and working within higher education, she spoke frequently about the growing burden of student debt. She talked about health insurance, medical studies, and tax reform. She worried about women’s health, racism, gun control, and the poor. She was smart, well-informed, and concerned about her home state of California, the United States, and the world in general. I think she would have proudly called herself a social justice warrior.

Going through her feed, I found evidence of aspects of her character with which I was already familiar. Like her enthusaism for Apple technology,

her tendency to tell it like it is,

and her hatred of TV commercials.

I also found opinions I agreed with,

and opinions that made me cringe.

As she did in real life, she frequently doled out advice:

I found tweets that made me laugh because I could hear her voice saying them,

tweets that made me laugh because they seemed to come out of left field,

and tweets that were poignant.

As is the nature of the medium, much of the live-tweeting is hard to piece together sans context. Characterized by its ephemerality, Twitter doesn’t even make it easy to go back through individual feeds. The medium is meant to provide a snapshot of what is happening right now. In spite of this, her feed now functions as a self-generated memorial. I now not only have photos and home movies of my grandma, I also have a testament to our shared love of technology, pop culture and social media.

Comedians and other public personas have learned the hard way that the things we post on the internet can come back to haunt us. The flip side of this semi-permanence is that we leave a record of our lovely, embarrassing, messy humanity. Social media is not just a snapshot of the now, but a photo album of our public thoughts and opinions as they change over time. While I now have several of her paintings framed in my living room, for me, her Twitter feed paints a fuller picture of the complex, funny, outspoken woman she was.

It’s a Twitter legacy I can only hope to live up to.