I have a friend on Facebook. She has a busy profile: lots of photos of her smiling with friends, game and cause requests, wall posts of current events, and notices saying “you were tagged” in so-and-so’s photo, altogether about 3 or 4 wall posts per day, with 118 friends, 25 of them in common with me.
It’s was a couple of months since I’d seen her last. I posted on her wall to keep in touch. I sent her a message, “Hey Roxanne! Long time no see." And another, "You forget who your friends are? How you doing?” A couple days with no response, so I gave her a poke. Nothing.
Not surprising. I’m facebooking the dead.
An inkling came with questions on her wall: “Roxanne, are you OK?” and “When are you coming home?” Then, “You are loved.” -- “People are worried about you.” -- “We miss you.” and “Hugs are waiting for you.”
Wall post activity increased as the word traveled through the FB community. Mixed in with the usual game requests and events were posts like “We’ll miss you Roxanne” -- “You’ve gone to a better place” -- “I can’t believe I won’t see you again” and “My thoughts are with you and your family.”
No one says it outright, but Roxanne is dead.
It was a tragedy. Roxanne, wife, mom, co-worker and friend was gone, leaving a husband and three children behind. I look at the photos, I read the posts on her wall and I can’t understand. How could this happen in front of us all? One hundred and eighteen “friends”, no one sensed the pain Roxanne was in?
That was five months ago. The latest post on Roxanne’s wall was within the past twenty hours. Her picture is the same, an attractive woman in her early forties, with an air of boldness and delicate strength. Her FB page deftly masks the inner struggle which took her life. Roxanne is gone, but her Facebook persona remains.
What happens to us on FB after we’re gone? Will it carry my ghost back to haunt those many earthly “friends” I'll leave among the living. How many dead are present among us even now on Facebook? Hundreds? Thousands? A million, or more? Their pictures still fresh and alive, their pages still sharing personal aspects of the former lives of the departed.
But the profiles of the dead remain.
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