Death and Facebook

People sometimes think I'm a bit cold hearted or morbid when it comes to death. The reason is that my parents never sheltered me from death. I've been to more funerals than I can count. Most of them were for people I either didn't know or didn't know well. I was just there to run the sound and help out as needed setting up chairs and tables for the dinner afterwards. I will admit that I do enjoy the dinners after funerals. The food is usually awesome and it's a good chance to see people I might not have seen in quite a while. Plus, it's a good ministry to those who don't have a church home and may not be Christians. Because I've been around so many, I've even had ideas of what I'd like done at my funeral if I were to die suddenly by getting hit by a Mack truck. I also know that if I were to know my last meal were coming I'd want a milkshake from Fair Oaks Dairy. Ok, so this is a bit morbid, but death is a part of life and you can't escape it. Social network sites make it particularly hard to escape the death of a loved one.
I've had a Facebook account now for somewhere around a year now. It's something I got only grudgingly and mostly because my sister kept harassing me to do it. Part of the motivation was that I knew I would be moving soon and figured it would be a good way to keep in touch with friends since many of them were on FB already. Facebook has a feature where it looks at your profile and friends list and makes suggestions of other people you may know. Initially, almost all of my friends on FB were from Northside so it started guessing other people from NS that I might know. One of those was Rodney, one of my closest friends. This creeped me out a bit because Lil' Rod had died almost 2 years before I signed up for FB. One of his sisters keeps up with his account so that people can still friend him so I would see others I knew becoming FB friends with him.
The weird thing is that they weren't becoming friends with him, but with his account. After almost a year, I finally friended Rodney and let me tell you, it's kind of weird. People still tag him in old pictures they post, people still write notes on his wall, in some ways he still seems to be alive. It's kind of like visiting a grave or making something in memory of a person, but far more interactive and social. This was the only experience I'd had with something like this until quite recently.
About a month ago, two of our international students at Asbury died tragically in a car wreck. I didn't know the passenger, but I did know the driver, Charles. Charles and his wife, Elizabeth, often came to the library in the evenings for a little while to use the computers or to borrow a projector to watch movies on the weekend. Over the course of the school year, I got to know them a bit better. Charles friended me on Facebook and I got to see pictures from their wedding and trips to India. He even started playing a game on FB called Farmtown and I would help him out and he'd work on my farm (I know, it's cheesy, but it's like a social version of SimFarm). He'd sometimes e-mail me tech questions which I rarely knew the answer too but would find out for him. He even invited me and a few others over for a game night, but I couldn't attend because of work. The car accident happened just 2 days before their planned game night. It also happened about 12 hours after I had last talked with him and played on FarmTown with him. It was a shock to say the least. But then the most amazing thing happened.
People were writing all kinds of notes on his wall. The seminary put a place on their forums where people could write notes for his relatives and for Liz but very few people did. Instead, they posted them to his Facebook. And so did Liz. It was very eerie. Grieving that has traditionally been done in private was done in public by many people. Even now, a month later, people are still posting to his wall.
In many ways, Facebook has made it possible for us to keep the memories of loved ones more alive than ever before. But it also seems to prolong the grieving process, at least for me. I've lost other friends before, but a few months after the funeral the memories started to fade. With Facebook, it seems almost like those individuals are still alive and I have to remind myself that while they still live in heaven, I can never again see them here on earth. That just seems to make the loss feel fresh all over again.
Whether for better or for worse, Facebook has certainly changed the dynamics of grieving the loss of a loved one. I already have two friends on FB who cannot respond to me any longer. Let's pray that they're the only two like that for a long time!