A Digital Death

I’ve started a morbid hobby that’s made me realize the digital age is changing the way handle death. When I hear on the news about a young person who’s died in a car accident or crime, I can’t help but check and see if they have a Facebook page, and often they do. There’s something unfinished about finding a dead person’s page, knowing their status will never be updated , that it’s possible no one knew their username and password so the profile will continue to exist longer than the actual person, almost like they never died to those who only interacted with them through cyberspace. The last two names I searched were young women, unique names, both engaged, both posting gushing wedding-related messages on their wall about their excitement for the big day and then, nothing- a story left unfinished, a promise never fulfilled. I didn’t know these women but from their info. page I learned one liked amusement parks, that she listened to punk rock and that the other loved Halloween and dining out. I often like to think that it’s a courtesy from God that we live to see the big events of our lives, but with one of these women dying days away from her wedding, it has me reconsidering this comic rule that I now sense I’ve made up.

Two weeks ago my hobby took a personal turn. The news that a high school friend had died came to me via a Facebook message. He had just returned to Iraq and for reasons unknown to me, committed suicide. When I logged on to find my newsfeed full of well-wishes from other high school friends, it was unreal, especially since we’d IM’d not long ago.

It appears no one knew his password so a message was left on his wall directing friends to a memorial page. Here, friends collected over the decades posted photos , memories, and video tributes. By joining the group I regularly received updates on services and was able to read his obituary from the local paper. Days after the funeral my newsfeed showed I could watch “highlights” from his hometown service. I admit, it was strange seeing someone my age lying in a coffin, someone who’d responded when I typed “Wassup?” into the IM box, but the funeral video finally make all the digital type about his death real.

I don’t know if I’m prepared for this new technological and untraditional reality of death. It used to be distant, something that happened to my parent’s friends or people I hadn’t spoken to in years, but now with the invention of Facebook I know about the major events in the life of anyone I’ve ever met-- even their dying, and sadly I’ve extended it to the death of strangers. So what happens to those pages of people who’ve died? Facebook does allow you to “memorialize” an account which removes sensitive information, but you must submit a news article or obituary, and that’s often not the family’s first priority, so for a brief window I get to glance into a budding life unfinished. In some ways the existence of a profile on a server somewhere makes if feel like they continue to life on, even if the “what’s on your mind?” is goes unanswered. It all seems a tragic tease, or is it a reminder that life often ends suddenly, when our last status update was what we ate for lunch.