A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea
medium.com
medium.com
It reminds me of Cory Monteith's (from Glee) recent passing. His last tweets were, "what the crap is Sharknado" "oh. IT'S A SHARK TORNADO." Just seems so odd to be remembered that way.
A friend's page/wall is live it just says "lived" instead of "lives". I can't recall any spam related to his page since I notified FB so I think they must lock it down too.
I have dead people in my phone contact list, because deleting them just feels weird.
> Anyone can send private messages to the deceased person
Not sure what Facebook intends by offering this since no one will be able to log in to the account to read them.
It was very difficult to get information off facebook (pictures, etc.) once the page was memorialized after the death of a loved one.
His friend died and all of his accounts went silent along with some grieving notes.
Then, a few months later, the deceased's account was compromised by a spammer. Posts from a spammer posing as a dead friend is about the worst kind of spam I can imagine.
'John wants to connect with you', Oh that's cool, wtf?! John's dead?!
>Depending on the privacy settings of the deceased person's account, friends can share memories on the memorialized timeline
I'd love to know which Privacy Settings control this ability, it's interesting they don't specifically call out the relevant option.
Now that the account is banned I don't know if I'll ever be able to reconnect with him.
Much better than a scammer, but still kind of a weird experience.
I've had to reduce the size of the "contacts" square on my Windows phone though as the larger sizes it flashes up pictures culled from various address books and for some reason picked his more regularly than anyone else's and having his face pop up almost every time I looked at my phone felt a tad odd.
It wouldn't be a bad idea to take up instructions for one's online life in one's will; Facebook accounts to make announcements on and close, domain names to transfer or disband, projects to close / reassign, online contacts to inform, etc.
I should get to that actually. If I died, nobody of the close friends I have online would have any way of knowing, and the RL people I know (few as they are) don't know them either.
It did happen: he left details of how to get into his key store (which included his facebook password) where family could find it.
Wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanatosensitivity
The seminal paper: http://www.chi2009.org/altchisystem/submissions/submission_m...
Facebook still reminds me when it is her birthday (although I never forget anyway) and in a way I find it quite comforting to have an external reminder of her. It makes me feel while she has gone she is still here in some strange little ways. Nobody truly dies on the internet.
I would also like to say thank you to all those who have said such kind things in your replies.
[0] I hate that expression but it seems to be the only way to phrase it
It is a bitter sweet moment indeed. Im kind of glad i got the notification really.
Birthday notifications were sad, but the reconnect business drove me up a wall. I would pay anything if I could to reconnect with him now, but they don't know that.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/facebook-ads-showin...
In general, the bereaved don't need platitudes which cheapen their loss or try to fast-forward them through the grieving process. Don't presume to know what the deceased _or_ the bereaved feel or _should_ feel, and don't assume they share/d your beliefs.
Instead of 'comfort and a kind word', try 'comfort' until you are asked for more. Be present for those who are grieving. Offer to help in any way you can if you can, and help when called upon.
Just listening is profoundly useful. Often, they're not really listening to you anyway.
To me, in grief, platitudes and comforting words seem like a useless distraction and annoyance, but I wouldn't then go on to suggest your way of being around the grieving is what everybody needs to be doing. He was being nice and wasn't hurting anybody doing it, and there isn't such a dearth of those posts that we need to attack them.
Keep it to yourself.
By the way, her words were something along to lines of "He's with God now, and that's the best thing in the world."
Before human beings developed external memories (photographs and now digital records of everything we do), trauma and negative memories were supposed to slowly fade away, and they did. Only mildly emotional residues remained. Our psychological itch to keep experiencing sights and sounds associated with a thing or person lost could not be scratched no matter how tempted we were.
Now we can. Not only that, we consider it some sort of obligation to carry the burden. We scratch the wound just as it starts to heal and it's like experiencing the loss over and over again.
or may be that's just my experience. I used to be in a permanent state of melancholy because I always reminisced about past losses, even when the present was good. I don't do that anymore. I've a rule, in fact: never replay a negative experience more than once unless you have new data to re-evaluate it in a different light.
Remembering good things (and apparently the past tends to be seen in positive light, regardless of whether we felt happy at the moment) causes the mismatch between our memories and the reality. Possibly because we're very social species, a deceased person causes the worst pain.
What happens when your user is dead? are the kinds of special use cases we often fail to consider when rushing out the minimum viable product.
http://www.thomaspurves.com/2006/05/10/the-dead-sender-probl...
We exchanged passwords with my best friend on these social sites, he is being funny and joking guy asked me to update his status something like "hell is hot" if he dies first.
Thankfully on the Monday after she passed, one of her family members posted about her passing on her wall and many of her friends (myself included) shared condolences. Had it not been for FB and those messages, I may never have known.
Around The Corner
Around the corner I have a friend,
In this great city that has no end,
Yet the days go by and weeks rush on,
And before I know it, a year is gone.
And I never see my old friends face,
For life is a swift and terrible race,
He knows I like him just as well,
As in the days when I rang his bell.
And he rang mine but we were younger then,
And now we are busy, tired men.
Tired of playing a foolish game,
Tired of trying to make a name.
"Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim
Just to show that I'm thinking of him",
But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes,
And distance between us grows and grows.
Around the corner, yet miles away,
"Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today."
And that's what we get and deserve in the end.
Around the corner, a vanished friend.
-- Charles Hanson Towne
As far as I know, there are no do-overs. So make a point of keeping in touch with the people you care about.
The online stuff is a bit hard for me to deal with. She had a friendster page, but not Facebook. There's a memorial, and some other snippets floating around. There's a glimpse of her in a Moloko video, and another (shorter) glimpse in the video of the Smith's last concert.
I get no comfort at all from that memorial page, and it left me pretty much anti the idea of them.
There's quite a lot of misinformation about her life, and her death, but she's dead and people close to her were grieving so I just ignored it and kept quiet. But it makes reading that stuff very hard.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI)
(http://www.a-free-guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1)
(http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all-day...)
(http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn-davis...)
As someone who has been in the same situation (though in my case my friend survived), I am very sorry for your loss. I still have nightmares sometimes about that experience - hearing the authorities bark orders into the phone on one end, hearing her scream at me, calling me a "traitor" when she realized I'd divulged her plans that she told me in confidence[0]. I even remember the exact song that I had been playing in the background (to give background noise, so she wouldn't realize I was on the other line) - I haven't been able to listen to it since.
Back to the topic, though: I'm in the opposite situation. This former friend and I haven't spoken in many years (for unrelated reasons), and it would cause a lot of problems in our social networks if we reconnected. Still, every now and then (perhaps once a year or so), I am reminded of her and have the inclination to check in on her. We're not Facebook friends, but thanks to Twitter, her public blog, etc., it's easy for me to see that she's alive and well[1].
I'm not sure how I would react if I checked one day and found that she had passed on, whether by taking her own life[2], or from "natural" reasons. It would certainly be very difficult emotionally to handle seeing remnants of her life all across the Internet, almost all of which have been generated after the last time we spoke in person.
[0] I pride myself on my integrity in general, but I don't regret my actions here. (She apologized later, for what it's worth).
[1] for some definition of "well".
[2] given the aforementioned history, there is a non-zero chance of this
I know how you feel.
Fishing is dangerous work. Over the last year I slowly learned how many people had died. I learned about more when I finally went back up to visit. The fisherman's memorial was a tough thing to walk by. It was even tougher to hear that people I had loved had died one, two, five years earlier and I had no idea.
Life is short. Maintain those friendships.
The difference now is that people who are in the acquaintance-Internet friend spectrum can still be reached easily with an email, a tweet, an instant message… if you wanted to. So they always feel kind of "there" even if you don't actually communicate with them. Until, like the author, you try to reach out and they don't reply back.
It's kind of an interesting thing of online "friends": you can be in touch with somebody in a chat room or a forum for years and feel like you know them well (at least in the context, you've known them), but they can just disappear one day and you won't know if it's because they died or just moved on to other things.
I was thinking about that about a guy I've been playing Words with Friends for probably three years. I only play with him because I know we're about the same level and it's hard to find players like that. (we were matched randomly) But I don't know anything about him except for his first name, most likely his birth year (based on his username) and possibly the fact that he lives on the East Coast based on the time he plays his turns. If he were to stop playing, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from him being dead. It's a strange thing.
This happened to me recently, as well. I hadn't spoke with my best friend from Junior high in years (since I was 18), and I looked him up this past winter... died in Iraq (in 2006!), in an attack on his convoy. The reports were mixed. He either died by gun fire while defending the convoy after the initial attack, which was a road-side bomb, or he died as a result of the road-side bomb. It was the weirdest feeling, because I was sure I could have him on the phone in less than 1 day, and we'd be reminiscing about all the fun times we had back in the day, etc., and have some sort of "let's do that sometime soon" plans before the call was over. I was wrong. What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days... I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys.
This happens to the best of us. In itself, it does not make you a terrible friend.
> What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days.
You never know - she may be happy to hear from you regardless.
This has to be the saddest thing I've read in this whole thread.
As much as a posthumous online presence could be unsettling, I really wish I had more tangible things to remind me of her.
> I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow.
In case you're still harboring any sense of guilt over this, please don't. You are not responsible for your friend's death.
This is a common reaction when a friend or acquaintance commits suicide; it's normal, but don't let it get the better of you.
It was around Christmas 2009, back in my middle-of-nowhere hometown. We got the old high school posse back together for the first time in 7 or 8 years. Everyone was doing pretty well on their own terms, from my one friend running his repair shop, to my other friend finishing up at an elite law school, to my own international adventures.
All of us, except one.
Despite getting an MBA, this dude was totally stuck in a rut, unemployed and somehow marooned back in our shitty hometown. I already had plans to return later in January and told him I'd give him a call. By the middle of January, he was gone.
I've always wondered if my failure to set up plans to meet with him contributed to his depression and ultimate demise—if there's anything I could've noticed or done to stop it. Probably not, because he had lots of other problems. But I think the thought is always going to follow me.
Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.
So we keep in touch with these people we would ordinarily have forgotten about, or perhaps had an occasional thought about but not cared enough to pursue. Is this change encouraging a meaningful relationship, or just a superficial one?
Deleted my FB account once I had the realization above. People I speak to regularly, I speak to regularly regardless. Not surprisingly, none of the 'long lost' contacts I picked up have kept in touch with me since then; nor have I attempted to keep in touch with them.
Which just serves to reinforce my point - when it was no longer convenient, we stopped keeping in touch. Which means that neither party actually cared enough to pursue it.
Social media makes it easier to avoid and mitigate that awkwardness. The obvious response is, "That awkwardness shouldn't matter," but "should" is a big word. It still matters.
False dichotomy. Friendships come on a continuum. If facebook shifts some of the marginal ones over the line from "not worth maintaining" to "worth maintaining", surely that's a good thing.
One day I saw on facebook that an old acquaintance was looking for company at an interesting-sounding dinner. So we went there and had a good evening. We've been in very little contact before or since, and would probably not have been in touch at all without facebook - but that was a nice evening nevertheless, and well worth having facebook for.
How many close friends do you think your grandparents had? How many people did they interact with? This is not a byproduct of passivity, but a byproduct of having a larger pool of "friends."
You can easily prepay up a good sum on most hosts, aws, digital ocean, etc. plenty of good low-cost mail apis too, like mailgun.
You can customize your notification intervals to make them longer or more frequent, if you want. The risk isn't very big, though, especially if you remember to log in every first of the month, for example, just to make sure.
I don't know I'm surprised a kill switch service like this doesn't exist.
I think it is entirely reasonable that some people would want to prevent this from happening.
Pancreatic cancer is a bitch -- he was gone in about three months, and he was (a) busy as fuck wrapping stuff up and (b) very sick for much of that period. He had all he could handle.
I did get to go to a memorial for him a few months later. I still miss him; one of the best programmers I know, and he got me into motorcyling 25 years ago.
Maybe he isn't a hypocrite but I have seen this too often from people who are.
That's when I decided to remove my birth date from FB. That is about the only time most of your "friends" will remember that you (may still) exist.
I have stated in my will that my executor will put an indication about my demise on any social media accounts that folks might visit. And I included a signed letter authorizing said social media outlets to allow them to do so in my absence. Strange thing to have to include but it is the new world.
Chatting with it now is a lot like chatting with one of us. Granted, it doesn't always make sense, but the style of responses comes through.
Sure, it's not going to convince folks you're still alive, but it might provide entertainment to the great-great-great grandkids, let them know what you were like.
I hadn't heard from her in awhile, and her not responding back via text messages was always weird. I then checked out her facebook and saw all of the wall posts and lost my shit.
What I wouldn't give to just have five more minutes to complain about the dumb shit one final time.
Now and again, I see stuff related to her show up on facebook and I just kind of stop and think for a bit.
He had cystic fibrosis and went from perfectly healthy to dead in about four days.
His father and friends have taken up his various online presences--facebook, website, twitter. It's a neat little community that formed around him, even in his absence.
He was one of my first BBS-friends, helped me set-up my first PC compatible, lent me an external hard-drive and taught me a lot about programming. By the time I finally found him, I realized he died six months before.
We take our friends for granted. They are not.
I don't actually know he's dead. I only know that none of our mutual friends have heard from him, and that he was fighting with almost-certainly-terminal cancer to begin with.
The supremely interconnected world of social media has certainly created problems. But there are other circumstances that people don't understand as well, situated some time between "all we have is the postal service" and "all we had was email" that don't even give you the closure of an obviously-defunct Facebook account or the direct reassurance of other friends/relatives.
Many people here might not realize that before this sort of issue there was an entirely different one, and it ends with... well, it doesn't end. Which is really the problem.
My friends were all Facebook users, and I knew them before FB existed. We were connected through those services, but we didn't really communicate. They were wonderful people, all of them, and every time I learned of the news of their passing, it was through Facebook.
My parents still read the newspaper, looking for the news about "who died". (They are also interested in the weather, but that's about it.) Nowadays, it seems social media is our generation's obit distribution system.
In the end, I'm thankful for their images on Facebook. Even though we were no longer "daily" friends, I still miss them.
But today with the so powerful communication means we have, there is no excuse that people can't be informed of such major events.
It looks like there is a missing Internet service there. I don't think this should be charged, so I don't expect the opportunity for a big business there and a so called startup.
But there there is definitely a need there and Internet solidarity or ISPs service should probably be the way to go to offer such type of service.
Probably country administrations could be involved as well because we want to be sure there won't be fake death announcements.
It was triggered by the sudden death of one of the Well's prominent/prolific members, Blair Newman, which resulted in a lot of conversation about what happens to one's digital presence after death. In Blair's case, he had removed his content from the system and closed his account (as there were those who were bullying him) before his death. It was decided to restore the content (from backups) into a Memorial sub-conference for him not long after his death.
passive relationships are not genuine.
Another is that, perhaps, Facebook's redefinition of the term "friend" has taken some of the meaning out of it.
This leaves us in an emotionally precarious position: I've called someone a friend, and perhaps even interacted with them more than I would've otherwise, thanks to this online facilitation.
Does that make it more or less important? Does the difference matter? I don't think these are trivial questions. My opinion is that, no, someone you talk to infrequently on Facebook is not your "friend" in the same way as someone you see and interact with regularly outside of the webbynets.
But I do think that point of view, if it isn't already, will soon be outdated. For better or worse, our online interactions are more numerous and significant. Perhaps it's time we consider that possibility and start re-evaluating our assumptions regarding friendship, what it entails, and what it requires.
In the days before the Internet, there were generally three ways to stay in touch with distant friends: writing letters, making telephone calls, or visiting in person. All three required varying degrees of time and effort on ones part, but this was offset by the simple pleasure of conversing with a friend. People didn't bother engaging in this sort of activity with acquaintances or "rather pleasant kinda-friends", because the personal connection didn't exist. There was no "payoff" significant enough to offset the effort.
The likes of Facebook remove most of this time and effort requirement. You can "friend" people you haven't spoken to in years or even decades with a minimum of difficulty. While I'm sure there are plenty of cases where the lack of communication could be due to external causes (divorce, reassignment, death, job loss, etc) there are undoubtedly many more cases where people simply "drifted apart" because they found they didn't have strong common interests.
Many Facebook (and similar social media) relationships really aren't "genuine" (as eyeareque stated) for this reason. Neither party really is interested in putting additional effort into the relationship beyond a simple "like" button click every now and then, if even that.
The OP's story is sad, and while I agree with their summary that we should treasure our friends and family while we have them, let's not pretend that the Golden Age of Social Media has somehow provided us with a revolutionary relationship tool.
Facebook is a dynamic, 21st Century version of the old "phone number and address book": full of people to whom you might send a Christmas card, but little else.
ex: If you spend time with a friend weekly or even monthly and then suddenly you never hear or speak to them again. Don't you think you'd actively pursue them to find out what is up before too long? I'm sure you wouldn't wait two years to investigate.
Quitting facebook/social networks will show you who your real friends are.
A lot like this thread, it hit me right in the feels :(
The other thing that's been nice is that we were able to find my sister's FB password, and were able to post her obituary. We continue to post pictures of her two young daughters she left behind.
When I say things like, "Silicon Valley is a gigantic, worthless circle jerk," articles like this bring it starkly to light. I'm sure this guy feels many things about the death of his colleague, but I doubt he understands the irony of how it conflicts with the waste of his own life on efforts like his startup.
His name is still displayed on my frequently chatted contact list. The thought of pining him or e-mailing him has crossed my mind so many times..
I at least have learned to post a "curated" version of my life online (after I was shown it wasn't good to share everything, even though I do tend to be quite open by default), and I assume many do the same, so you're not learning what's really happening with peoples' lives.
When I die, I expect it to take a few days or more before anyone notices. Then neighbors and immediate family will be aware, followed eventually by work and then my colleagues. My friends (who are all out of state) will probably never know.
I worried about it for like five minutes, once, but then realized that by the time it mattered, I would be dead, so why would I care at that point.
You don't have that many "friends" as you think you do.
Does that mean I don't have a single friend?
lef.org is a great resource even if they are selling stuff to you...
He just told the OP he's waiting for "answers" from the doctor. He can't make travel plans. He says it's long, gruesome, UGH.
Guys. In case you have the social instinct of a cockroach, this is what they call A SIGN. Not a subtle one, either. That is when you LEAP to care for your friend.
Here's what you do. You ask: Wait a minute, forget about whatever it is I wanted to talk about -- what's wrong? Are you okay? Do you want to talk? Why don't I come visit you instead of expecting you to travel?
Alas, the author just glossed forward with "Well if you decide you can make it, let me know!"
The sick (now dead) friend expressed well wishes for health to the OP, only to receive what kind of well wishes in return? None. Not even "good luck with your doctor's visit that I don't want to ask about cuz I'm not comfortable expressing feelings."
How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"?
> "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend."
Yes, but not because you didn't know he died. But because you didn't care enough to notice or ask while he was alive.
edit: rewording my first sentence per comment below
I'm pretty sure you don't need social skills to be self-centered.
They weren't really good friends. And he did wish him the best, and asked if he could help.