On Too Damn Young we’ve talked about hacking into the Facebook page of a loved one after he or she has passed away.The reason for the hacking was to take down the page, but what happens when you leave the page of a loved one up?
I learned that if you leave the person’s Facebook page up it turns into a memorial. It’s a physical place where anyone can speak to the one they lost. An open forum for grief if you will.
Personally, I’ve never had to deal with the nuances of Facebook and the death of a loved one because when my mom died I was 10 and Facebook was still not around and when my grandmother died she had not clue what Facebook was. After clicking through on a name tagged in a friend’s post, I figured out that leaving the FB page up brings a lot of comfort.
My friend was posting about a memorial service in honor of the death anniversary for a friend she lost. Her friend was tagged, when I clicked on his name, I was let into an open forum for grief and a safe haven to express the feelings that come along with it: loss, grief and simply missing someone who’s gone.
Death cuts out a lot of the physical connection we feel to our loved one. We can no longer touch them or talk to them and hear them talk back to us. Facebook has opened a door for a one way conversation people are comfortable having.
As I scrolled through his Facebook page, there was post after post; all open letters to how much he was missed, to how they’d be celebrating life if he were around. His dad wrote a letter to him on his Facebook page on what would have been his 21st birthday.
He is dead, but to me in those moments of reading through his Facebook page I was moved by his life. Here was a person who people loved so intensely that they use his Facebook page as a way to stay connected with him.
They may have lost his physical presence, but the reminder of who he was to them will never die because every time someone posts on his page, he’ll pop up to the top of his friend’s timeline.
Have you ever posted no the Facebook page of someone who has died? Or have you kept one up as a memorial to someone?
Image: WeHeartIt
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