The Reviews They Left

You find it by accident, which is the only way these are ever found: you are shopping for something ordinary — a hose, a kettle, a pair of boots — reading the reviews the way everyone does, and there, halfway down, under a familiar name, in a voice you would know anywhere, is your father. Four stars. Does the job. A bit stiff in cold weather but holds up. Would buy again. Written three years ago, or five, on an ordinary evening you knew nothing about, when he happened to have an opinion about a garden hose and happened to type it into the void — and it is still there, still up, still quietly helping strangers decide whether to buy the hose, in his exact cadence, his particular dry practicality, unmistakably him, preserved in the least sentimental place imaginable: a product review of a length of rubber tubing.

It is one of the odder places grief ambushes you, and one of the gentlest, because there is nothing mournful about the setting — no memory feature, no anniversary, no candle, just a shopping page and a star rating — and that is exactly what makes it land the way it does. Because the dead left opinions everywhere. We forget how much small public writing an ordinary modern life scatters behind it: the product reviews, the star ratings, the restaurant write-ups, the comments on articles, the forum posts answering someone’s question about a lawnmower, the little thumbs-up and the two-line verdicts a person types across decades without ever thinking of them as writing. It is the most casual prose a person ever produces, and the most honest, because nobody performs for a review of a toaster — and it survives, all of it, timestamped and searchable and attached to their name, scattered across the internet in a thousand tiny places, waiting to be stumbled on.

The voice in the least likely place

What gets you is how them it is. A person’s whole character can fit in a four-star review, if you know them, because the small honest reaction to an ordinary object is character in miniature — the practicality or the fuss, the generosity or the exacting standard, the dry humour, the fairness. Your mother’s review of a restaurant is your mother entire: the specific things she noticed, the way she gave credit and the way she withheld it, the phrase she’d have said out loud. Your father awarding four stars and not five to the hose, and explaining the missing star with scrupulous fairness — a bit stiff in cold weather — is your father’s whole relationship to the world in one line, the refusal to overpraise, the exactness, the sense that things should be judged on their merits and told the truth about. You are not reading a review. You are hearing them think about something, in their own voice, unguarded, unaware of being overheard — which is a way of having them back that the solemn archives can’t manage, because the solemnity gets in the way, and a product review has no solemnity at all, just the person, being characteristically themselves about a kettle.

And they are so alive in it, in the mundane present tense of having an opinion. A review is a snapshot of a mind at its most ordinary and engaged — someone bothered enough to weigh in, to share what they found, to help the next person, to render a small verdict on a small thing. It catches them mid-life, mid-preference, doing the low pleasant business of being a person with tastes and standards, and it is dated, so you can see exactly when — three years ago, five, a Tuesday evening you’ll never account for, when they were alive and had bought a hose and had thoughts about it and typed them out. Nothing could be less like a monument, and few things bring them closer.

The stranger they’re still helping

And here is the small warmth at the bottom of it, the thing I did not expect to find in a product review: they are still being useful. Because the review does its job whether or not its author is alive. Strangers are still reading your father’s verdict on the hose. Someone, this week, deciding between two hoses, scrolled the reviews and read his four stars and his fair account of the cold-weather stiffness, and factored it in, and it helped — a small honest contribution to a stranger’s small ordinary decision, made by a man who has been dead three years, still landing, still doing what he meant it to do, which was to tell the next person the truth about the hose. The dead go on quietly advising the living, from a thousand shopping pages and review sites, on kettles and campgrounds and boots, their honest little verdicts still in circulation, still weighed, still trusted by people who have no idea the reviewer is gone.

There is nothing to do about the reviews, and that is part of why I love them — you don’t have to decide whether to keep or delete them, they are not yours to manage, they just sit out there in the world being small and honest and useful, and every so often one surfaces and hands you back your dead in the least expected voice. I have gone looking, once or twice, on purpose — searched a name, scrolled for the scattered opinions, gathered up a person’s stray verdicts on ordinary things — and it is its own strange sweet way of spending an evening with them, reading what they thought of a restaurant, a book, a pair of boots, hearing the exact dry voice render its exact fair judgment, again and again, on the small stuff of a life. They left their opinions everywhere. They are still up. Strangers still read them. And somewhere out there, right now, a length of garden hose is being judged, four stars, fairly, a bit stiff in cold weather but holds up, would buy again — by a man who is gone, still telling the truth about it, still helping, still, unmistakably, himself.