One might imagine such virtual mourning is shallow, but it's not. Here is a real gathering place, where friends can grieve together—and where the deceased continues, in some sense, to exist. "You're creating something like a tombstone, but people can visit that tombstone anytime, anyplace, as long as they have Internet access," says Brian McLaren, a leader in the emerging church movement and author of A New Kind of Christianity. "That seems to me to be a great gain."
Facebook changed their policy regarding profiles of deceased persons in 2009, now allowing them to remain in place indefinitely. TIME ran a piece in August 2009 talks about what happens to a deceased person's online profiles, and also how those profiles can be a source of comfort for grieving parents:
Before her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged on to Facebook. Back then, social-networking sites were used almost exclusively by the young. But she knew her daughter Amy Woolington, a UCLA student, had an account, so in her grief Weiss turned to Facebook to look for photos. She found what she was looking for and more. She was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together, through posts her daughter had written, a blueprint of things she had hoped to do. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.
An independent Tufts University student newspaper has written about the phenomenon of memorials on both Facebook and MySpace:
In addition to dealing with the grieving process, online resources can be useful for organizing friends of the deceased for a common goal. In December 2006, Lily Karian, a freshman at Tufts, committed suicide. Her friends and family created a Facebook group in her memory and later used this group as a forum to organize a suicide prevention fundraiser, Walk for Lily, in her memory. The walk raised over $41,000.
“If it weren’t for the [Facebook] page, we wouldn’t have been able to get people together and explain what we were doing to raise money and mobilize the efforts,” Max Chalkin, a senior who organized the walk, said.
Diane Nash, a college professor who teaches courses on death and bereavement, opined in the Christian Science Monitor about why young people find it comforting to share their grief with others online:
If you search for "In Memory of..." on Facebook more than 100,000 results pop up. Following Michael Jackson's death, more than 150,000 people commented on his Facebook wall. The Virginia Tech tragedy pulled millions of young people to the site.
I have taught bereavement courses for 10 years and recently one of my students shared that he could not talk to his parents about his friend who died in an auto accident because they would cry or immediately change the subject.
But he could visit the world's largest social media website any time of day or night to talk about how much he misses his friend and how helpless he feels.
HFA is examining the role the internet plays in the lives of grieving children and adolescents in an upcoming webinar on June 15, 2010. The webinar is part of a three-part series on Helping Children and Adolescents Cope with Grief and Loss.
Participants in the webinar will be able to:
- Describe the roles of the Internet in the lives of children and adolescents and discuss three ways that adolescents may utilize the Internet in bereavement;
- Discuss the ways that children and adolescents use social networking sites such as Facebook to memorialize and discuss loss as well as the ways they might access grief specific sites such as kidsaid.com;
- Describe the opportunities that adolescents have to form on-line relationships that may result in loss;
- Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Internet as a form of grief support for adolescents;
- Discuss the clinical implications of research of Internet use for intervention with children and adolescents and their families, describing the possibilities and limitations for adults or organizations to offer support in a monitored, safe way;
