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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.