Eric, twenty-four, voiced a similar sentiment when I spoke with him about the matter. He found out about a high school peer’s death via a mutual friend’s profile. “I suppose that it’s common to learn of a friend’s death indirectly or in passing, but learning about it through a social networking site felt sort of cheap,” he explains. However, because they hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in years, he feels that reading the news online might’ve only “emphasized a distance that would have been there regardless.”
Sasha, thirty-eight, felt differently when he received multiple messages about the death of his friend. They were close in high school but hadn’t kept in touch throughout the years; the friend didn’t have a Facebook account. After his death, someone started a group page as a tribute to his life and those who knew him used it as a way to publicize memorial service information and coordinate informal group gatherings in his honor—meetings he says would be difficult to organize if not for the convenience of online communication.
For Sasha, learning of the news on Facebook didn’t make him feel distant from the death. “The reaction’s the same regardless of how you found out,” he believes. “It’s coming from someone you know and that’s more comforting.” He also appreciated the access that Facebook gave him to the memories shared by other mourners. “Facebook gives you something immediate to do, like sharing photos. The grieving process can start sooner … it’s immediate and ongoing,” he says.
Changing the Meaning of Goodbye
Whatever repose one derives from the process of mourning online, there’s no question that it’s quickly becoming a social norm. As Sasha puts it, “The more we live our lives online, the more common it’s gonna be.” A 2009 Journal of Adolescent Research study suggests a similar fate—researchers found that grievers will continue looking at or interacting with a deceased person’s profile months after the death. During the ten-month study, 4,780 comments were left on the profiles of twenty dead users. And there are numerous stories online of people finding peace with the loss by looking at old pictures, reconnecting with former friends through the person’s profile, and even leaving one last message on his or her Wall.
It’s almost as if you never really have to say goodbye, just as long as this person’s profile exists. Conversely, as long as a part of you remains in the virtual world, you’re never completely gone from your loved ones’ lives and that brings a certain amount of comfort as well. As death via Facebook becomes more common and normalized, it will increasingly affect how we grieve, how we come together to mourn, and perhaps even what we think of as closure. Now that Facebook has been around for a few years and we’ve witnessed how quickly it’s infiltrated our lives, it’ll be fascinating to see just how much an online presence can grow once the real world one passes on.
