As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.
When my girlfriend died I could not bring myself to remove her from my friends list. She is still there. Her beautiful smile looks at me nearly every day. Some days I am glad to see that little profile picture of hers and others it is painful. Her family could have the account closed I guess but I think they feel the same as me and closing it is like deleting a little part of what we have left of her :(
This is probably one of the most profoundly sad things I've read in a while. I don't know you or your girlfriend but I truly feel sorry for your loss. I am fortunate to (so far) have not experienced the deaths of many loved ones. I could only imagine the range of emotions I would feel, especially with their virtual presence persisting after they pass.
It has been almost 3 years now (December) so I have had time to "move on"[0]. I have a wonderful new girlfriend and life is good. I still miss Sima almost every day but people are right when they say time helps mend. It never takes away the feeling of loss but it does ease the pain (emotional pain is far greater than any physical pain I have ever experienced).
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
I feel you. A girl I dated passed away and her family deleted all of her social media accounts. I was already still coping with losing her in the real world and then she instantly vanished from the online world too. There were pictures of her and me that I no longer have access to, and our conversations now show up with a blank face (Facebook chat was the last way we communicated). The only remnant I could find of her online was an Etsy account. She had a wishlist on there with a few items on it and so I bought something she had picked and it is hanging on my wall right now.
Perhaps this is a good thing? (Forgive me if it's not and I'm being insensitive)
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.
I share your sense of not replaying the negatives, I let those go long before she passed. What about the good memories? Those are the ones I want to re-live. I want to replay the highs, the wild times, the experiences we had with and of each other. She has the other half of all the memories we created together. If I forget something, she is not there to remind me, and if I no longer have anything else to remind me, that memory can potentially be lost forever. Her social media disappearing just made this effect worse...
I remember reading about a study indicating that thinking about what isn't here causes unhappiness (and vice-versa, we're generally happy “in the moment”).
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.
Thank you, I appreciate it. It was not my intent to depress you...but if there is anything to take away, it's just don't leave anything unsaid with someone, because you never know when they could be gone...
I still have the last email that my Grandmother sent me in my Inbox. I never got around to replying to it when she was still alive. It's a very good motivator to reply to emails from my other relatives that would otherwise go unanswered as well.
I eventually had to fish up an obit for a friend that passed away after Facebook and Linkedin both suggested to me that I should "reconnect" with him after a couple of years.
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.
Even worse is this with "Sponsored" links/likes on Facebook ... When it pops up on your wall that your dead friend liked a page or something like that ... Creeps me out.
Please understand that something you think is helpful may not be. You should assume it isn't unless you have specific knowledge of the person involved.
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.
Half agree with your post, but I can see why you are downvoted.
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.
Disagree. While I was processing the pain of the sudden death of a family friend, someone who acted like a father to me my entire life someone else said something that she thought was being nice. In that moment it upset me so much I probably could have stabbed her. I still can't forgive her for it. She did hurt someone by doing it.
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."
I don't want to be disrespectful, just sharing my opinion. My dad passed away few months ago and we decided to delete his facebook account. It was too hard for us to see his pictures and suddenly feel the pain all over again. Especially on FB the profile picture shows up in unexpected places.(mutuals friends etc...). For us deleting the account seemed to the right thing to do for the healing process.
It is not disrespectful at all. Everybody heals in different ways. You do what you have to do to help yourself heal. I wish you and your family all the best and hope you find today easier than yesterday.
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.
A friend of mine passed away rather abruptly. A year and a half later his last.fm account started showing him as playing music, and this was picked up by facebook through some app. A friend of his had turned his old sound system back on (he was a DJ) and was using it, having no idea it was scrobbling the tracks back.
Much better than a scammer, but still kind of a weird experience.
A similar thing happened to me on steam. A friend who was much older than myself stopped playing games when he had his third child and we lost touch. His account stayed inactive for around 2 and a half years before it was taken over by someone. Unfortunately what was a reminder of an old friendship is now a banned account with a default avatar and a ridiculous name. It's sad that the account will always be tainted now. It was exciting to think he'd come back, only to investigate and find out it wasn't him.
Now that the account is banned I don't know if I'll ever be able to reconnect with him.
I've seen this happen before as well. I wonder if it would help to have a mechanism that basically removes the user's ability to log in but preserves their data.
I still have a dead (as of 15 months ago) friend's facebook account in my contacts in case his family (none of whom I knew) wish to contact people again (it is through accessing his account there that they let us know what we had heard/guessed was true and let us know what the funeral arrangements were.
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.
That probably won't happen unless either he had his FB password written down somewhere in his will (if any), or if FB gives access to accounts of the deceased to relatives - which, I can imagine, would be a big hassle for FB.
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.
You can actually have a Facebook "friend" marked as deceased (in quotes, because it's actually pretty stringent on how to make this happen, and you have to be family), which prevents them from showing up places like feeds and likes and search. I had to have my grandmother marked as deceased, and it was one of the most difficult parts of the posthumous clean up tasks.
My Grandma is still in my phone for that reason. I also couldn't wipe her laptop, so I just pulled the drive and replaced it. It's weird, the things that make death real.
There's a notification system where you can send a link to a newspaper obituary (as a FB Friend) and they apparently use that to memorialise the persons page.
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.
It's very unsettling. I'm still in college but I've had a couple friends who have passed. I just don't have the heart to unfriend their accounts. Once in a while, I'll be browsing Facebook and their account will pop up. Some other friend will comment on their page or something like that, and for a brief instant, you think they're still alive somehow (which makes no sense of course) before you realize it's just someone interacting with their page.
It really gives "famous last words" a whole new meaning since all your tweets and Facebook statuses are forever immortalized. It makes me wonder what seemingly mundane thing will be the last thing people see from me on social media and will in turn be the first thing people see on my page when they find out I'm dead.
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.
Very. Before my best friend passed, that morning his final tweet was "Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die." He died in a drunk driving accident in which he was the passenger several hours later that afternoon.
I'm sure that people who knew him (either personally or by enjoying his acting work) remember him differently. People who just followed him on Twitter, meh.
Coping with the death of friends who you've got as "friends" on an online service is… complicated, too. "Unfriending" them feels callous, but keeping them around has its issues too as services happily remind you that their birthday is coming up, or count up the months since you've seen them online.
I don't know if you're familiar with the "Black Mirror" series. They're very hard hitting commentaries on our modern societies. One of the episodes (the first one of the second season) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Black_Mirror_episodes#S... is about such a situation where a person is "brought back to life" using the "image" they've left on social media sites as well as on private digital archives (personal photos etc.). It's not too far from reality which makes it all the more disturbing. I highly recommend it.
A client I worked for had his CISO pass away unexpectedly at a relatively young age due to a heart attack. My client then recounted how he received a LinkedIn update a few days following his death, and the first thing my client thought was "talk about remote access!"...he has an interesting sense of humor.
One of my friends died couple of years ago, sometimes people would like or comment to his photos on facebook and it appears on my timeline, and it reminds all the great times we spent.
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.
My best friend since 5th grade recently passed a few months ago. People are still tagging him in pictures and whatnot. Occasionally people will tag him in photos I haven't seen yet and for a brief second I think he's still alive. Very distressing.
I wrote this blog piece back in in 2006 when the social media trend was just starting to emerge about what to with the social profiles of the deceased. As well with my own experiences as a software designer.
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.
A co-worker of mine from 10 years ago recently lost her battle with cancer. I hadn't talked to her in nearly decade, but we would Like each other's posts on FB occasionally.
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.
I wonder if there's a way to set up a "I'm dead" message that would post when you're dead. I dunno, maybe have an app check the SSN/NID status to be 100% sure, then post a prerecorded message...
a friend of mine died, and his obituary was posted on a blog he collaborated on. His twitter account retweeted his own obituary notice - presumably he had it automated to retweet things from that account that mentioned his name.
Sometimes it's nice to have a place to actually send things. It's like writing a letter to someone you never actually intend to send. I think in the case of Facebook, it's probably nice to actually push that "send" button on the message.
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
I've had this happen to me. And it really hurts. Partly from the reality of death, and partly because it's so easy to play the what if game. What if I'd called any of the many times I thought about doing so? How would things have been different?
As far as I know, there are no do-overs. So make a point of keeping in touch with the people you care about.
A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily".
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.
> A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily".
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
Is there anything you wish you had done different before it got to that point? I am sorry for your loss but these things usually do not just come out of the blue. There is usually a lot of history, history which could have potentially gone different.
I'm sorry you went through that. Of course a memorial page wouldn't help comfort you, when you know your friend was murdered, you know who the killer was, and there would never be justice, just the thought of how you failed, and how the killer was taunting you right to the end.
I come from a fishing town in Alaska and a year or so ago all of the people from my hometown started to show up on Facebook. I had been away for a very long time, lived all over the world, and only just started to get back in touch with my roots.
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.
Of course, this has happened for as long as people have been able to travel. Before the Internet, you'd move to a different city, and maybe you'd keep in touch with some people but for the most part, you'd never know what happened to most people you knew. Because as soon as they moved or changed their phone number, getting back in touch was limited or involved a certain amount of research.
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.
> 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.
My mother passed just after I graduated from high school in the late 90s and although it was pre-FB (et al) and she wouldn't have been into social networks, I do wish there was something that recorded who she was...her moving about, her voice, something. A bunch of her friends ransacked her house for her things, which I was told they (my mother and them) had previously agreed upon in the case of her death, and so when I got there, there was almost nothing left of her things. I can't remember her voice anymore so, in that sense, having a FB profile of hers wouldn't do it for me but a Youtube video would. That would be nice.
I'm in a similar boat. My mom passed away in 2001, and I have very few digital reminders of her (mainly just a few emails, but she never really got into the whole internet thing). She wasn't one to be photographed often, and even if she had been, I didn't get my first digital camera until a year or so after her death. I'm trying right now to recall her voice, and I'm having a lot of trouble doing so clearly.
As much as a posthumous online presence could be unsettling, I really wish I had more tangible things to remind me of her.
This happened with the first friend I ever made taking my CS degree. We were in a lot of classes together and corresponded on a semi-regular basis on Facebook over school breaks and things. I had talked to him a couple months prior to this school year starting, but once I got back and noticed he wasn't in any of the classes we were supposed to have together, a mutual friend of ours informed me that he had committed suicide over the summer. It was so jarring that just a few months had passed and he was gone. I looked back on our Facebook messages. I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. The last thing he had sent me was some funny cat gif and I hadn't responded. I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow.
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.
Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era. You don't need to reach out to your friends anymore, instead, we just consume each other's broadcasts.
I disagree. Modern communication, such as Facebook, email and phones enable us to maintain friendships over time and distances that previously was unrealistic. Twenty years ago, this would have been an instance of "someone I used to be friends with died." The difference here is that because of the modern communication available, there's an expectation that we can maintain the relationship over time and distance, even if we only catch up a few times in a year. In the past, these people would be more likely to disappear from our lives entirely.
An argument can be made that if people have disappeared from our lives entirely that indicates neither party was truly interested in maintaining that relationship. A friendship worth maintaining is worth maintaining even when it's not easy or convenient.
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.
I don't agree with your sentiments. People have tendency to get wrapped up in what is in front of them. Hence they lose contact with people who are far away, even though contacting them is no harder than contacting people who live nearby. When that goes on long enough, there's an awkwardness to contact them again, and people have a tendency to avoid that awkwardness.
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.
>A friendship worth maintaining is worth maintaining even when it's not easy or convenient.
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.
This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.
There's emotional distance and there's physical distance. I have been very close to people who are now very far from me. The fact that we don't get to speak often these days says nothing about the quality of the bond. Still very sad...
Your whole life you meet new and interesting people. Some you're close friends with for a while, but life takes you your own separate ways. When you meet years later, often you wonder how you were friends. But a few, you can pick up the conversation just like it was yesterday. They're still close friends - it's just the contact that's intermittent; life gets in the way.
Maybe not your friend today, but how about your friend from yesteryear? I reach out periodically to old friends that I have absolutely no contact with (no Facebook, no nothing) just to see how they are doing and reminisce, and they do the same.
And yet, where would we be without it? And it's not entirely passive. I hate Facebook in many ways but am thankful I get to see pics of my friend's babies and share sports news with friends I just dont have time to talk on the phone with often.
> Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era.
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."
This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.
I've long thought of a start up that would offer a kill switch service. Something that you checked into every so often to verify you were still alive (by email, text, or it just monitored your social feeds). If over a custom set period of time 30-365 days, if it hadn't heard anything it would attempt to confirm you're still alive either by notifying you directly or a friend to confirm if you weren't. At which point it will notify services to suspend accounts, or send a list of passwords or account access information to those you trust to handle deactivating your facebook, twitter,or turning it into a memorial of sorts (since I guess your social feeds kind of become a digital memorial of your life). The killer feature even possibly delete sensitive data you don't want relatives seeing on your computer by installing some client app. :P
I don't know I'm surprised a kill switch service like this doesn't exist.
I wrote this for just me a while back, and everyone I talked to about it thought it was morbidly weird. I'm glad there are others who think it isn't, but that might be something a startup had to contend with.
Wills and life insurance are morbidly weird, but like it or not people need them. People have "digital" estates now, that need to be managed just as much as one's physical affairs once they die.
Google actually has a form of this, called Inactive Account Manager. You can pick an amount of time and who you want to control your information when you die (or go into a coma?). Pretty awesome, I set mine up already.
Your link seems to have some hidden chars at the end, which is why it's not working (for me, atleast).
Here's the link without the extra chars - https://www.google.com/settings/account/inactive
That's really not what I took away from this. Why do you... you know, care what happens to your online accounts? Web accounts are no more special than your library or toll road accounts. The only reason bank accounts matter at all is because the contest need to be disbursed.
Do you want your on-line account compromised with Viagra spam after your death? Do you want your grieving family to receive BIGGER PENIS NOW advertisements from you once you've passed?
Your passing wouldn't cause it; and it could happen to anybody. However having it happen after you die is going to have an emotional impact on those who are still alive. How would it feel to open up facebook and see that you have a message from your deceased spouse? Not very good I imagine.
I think it is entirely reasonable that some people would want to prevent this from happening.
It's clear we disagree, and neither party will be convincing the other, so I thought I'd just leave something to think about and move on. Alas, here we are again.
Because (a) it sucks to be sending messages to an old friend online, wondering why he won't respond and not knowing that he's dead; (b) it sucks to get birthday messages and "reconnect" notices and spam from someone that you know is dead. Just like the article said and all the other comments mentioned, y'know?
http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is what I wrote years ago to do it. Make sure your messages don't scare people too much, in case you forget to check in/don't get the emails, though.
Yeah, there is a small risk, although, in all the years, it's been two instances where emails stopped going out and some people forgot to log in in that duration (nothing has ever gone out before its time).
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.
There are several services of varying levels of service, but honestly it's not that hard to write up a small script to fire off an email to get you to turn off the switch for a month. After multiple failures it assumes you are dead and sends a payload email to a trusted friend.
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 might want to check out Perpetu. It allows you to specify what happens to your online accounts (e.g. forward all your emails, write your final Facebook post, delete all tweets, etc): www.perpetu.co
Kinda had this happen. My ex-partner and close friend - "my rock" as I called her - Amanda "Moo" Hearn died a few years ago, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'd not called her for a couple of months. Kept meaning to. Then I suddenly had this urge to know how she was, and called, but the number had been disconnected, I think, so I called her sister who said "Oh, I'm so sorry Toby, Moo died yesterday." So yes, that Charles Hanson Towne poem (elsewhere on this thread) rings true for me. I email friends and call them occasionally and flippantly say "Hey, you're alive!" (I moved to the US six years ago and haven't been in touch quite like I used to be) and they don't realize I actually mean it. I hold a lot of guilt inside, dreading learning of another friend's death in a similar manner. Good to read this thread.
I lost a friend about a year and a half ago. He just stopped responding to email, and I found out he had died about two months after.
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.
I tend to hate stuff like this. He closes with suggesting life is fleeting and you should keep up to date with still living friends. There is no indication he is actually doing that. People routinely have wonderful things to say about the dead, often when they said (and did) terrible things to them while alive.
Maybe he isn't a hypocrite but I have seen this too often from people who are.
This reminds me of what I saw a couple weeks ago on Facebook.
I saw a friend's birthday popping up on FB. Then messages to that friend sending wishes of happy birthday and good health, peace, and everything else people wish you on your bday, started popping up on my timeline.
The problem was: she died two months ago. I didn't know exactly how to feel about that...
The funny thing is that this happened in a small town (13k people), where everybody knows each other.
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'm fine with acquaintances that don't really correspond with me when my birthday rolls around. However I explicitly don't wish anyone a happy birthday over facebook. If it's someone that's important to me, I will make it a point to either text them, call them, or otherwise arrange to meet up with them in person. Otherwise, I leave it unsaid.
And on the other side of weird, I got a request from a person to introduce them to someone in my LinkedIn contacts list that I knew had passed. I passed along the information so they could be informed but realized that no doubt this person was getting emails from recruiters and such. Got the image of someone laying dead in their casket with their phone humming incoming calls/texts.
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.
Too true and common. A friend of mine in sales taught me to make sure you reach out to everyone who matters to you in some fashion on a regular schedule. To put it on your calendar. I never gave it much thought outside business, but it's something I'm going to start doing.
I've had this happen to in the past. I may be cynical but I think most people just don't care enough about cultivating friendships with you, especially post-college. We just become too preoccupied with our jobs, family, obligations, etc. Even when we do have time to connect, we rather just sit in the couch and watch Breaking Bad instead.. too much effort. So yes, OP's thoughts are nice, but in the end, most of us just fall back to old habits.
When I was in my early 20's I had an intense email friendship with a girl I met in alt.music.nirvana. Her name was Michaels, and if you search hard enough, you can still find her Usenet posts on Google Groups. We lived on opposite sides of the world, but we kept in touch for over 2 or so years. Then she moved out of home, had no internet access and we list touch. One of the worst days of my life was the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. Not because it was the day he passed on, but because of what I found. I tried to look her up. I felt she must have found the internet again. It had been some years since my last search. Sadly I discovered that I was never going to get a chance to speak with her ever again, because she had died in 2001, 3 years earlier. I managed to speak to her family, and her father told me that he had often wondered what had become of me. It's still hard to deal with. I have a reminder for her Birthday and the day she passed. It's a weird one really.
Sucks. I had a friend/mentor pass and not find out for two years as well. I went to his blog, and was wondering why he never finished his house remodeling project... Found his wifes blog and found out about his year long fight with cancer. Life is precious.
Indeed. When my 10 year high school reunion came, we were surprised by several "Who knew?" instances of people passing away. It was always people 2 removed. With social media the amount of people 1 removed is closer, and it's easier to contact folks, but it's still a surprise to hear about young folks in that "see every year or so category" go. It's a shame when it's cancer.
I've long thought that somebody should write an app called "recycle me" for folks, like me, that post a lot on social media. It could just run your posts again in a loop, much like TV does reruns. If you had ten years or more of posts, it might even accomplish something like a poor man's immortality: you'd always be interacting with people, even people that weren't alive when you died. One can even imagine this being two-way: taking this to the next level by analyzing your online conversations and extrapolating what sorts of votes and comments you might make on new posts.
For people who post online heavily, I don't think this is as far away as some might believe.
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 had the same thing happen with a friend of mine who had moved. Her and I kept in touch periodically, and we'd always catch up and complain about the dumb shit going on in our lives.
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.
I had a friend die and I didn't find out for about 400 days. I was very upset, though I only knew this man via the internet...but we had been close friends for nearly a decade before having a falling out.
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.
Years ago, when Facebook was new and Orkut was taking its first steps, I decided to, once more, look up a good friend of my early computing career.
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.
Having lost -- I think? -- a friend whom I had before the advent of "friend me on FB," I can tell you there are more ambiguous, stranger ways to lose a friend, and they involve not finding out.
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.
This has happened to me a few times, now. Friends from high school and college passing away far too soon. At the time, I knew them well and we were very close. Of course, growing up and moving away and life progression takes you away from those you knew early in life to those late in life.
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.
Damned impressive and I can imagine how chocking it can be.
In old times we had necrology announcements in newspaper.
Family would publish an announcement and people would read the necrology. The locality property of the information would make it some how work.
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.
My Ph.D adviser (who was also a close colleague, mentor, and friend, very much not Ph.D's Prof. Smith) died this summer. One of the most acute grief triggers early on was seeing him in my chat roster (and shared Google Docs, calendar events, etc.).
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.
I think it is quite insensitive, the way that post has been written. Scattered with so many private messages and needless investigative fluff. I do think it brought to discussion an important topic, but I'm not sure I appreciate the way it did.
I have had a similar experience with a friend who died very young (probably suicide although I've never had confirmation).
Anyway now every year a bunch of people still post something for his birthday some comments are followed by RIP others are not. I suspect some of these people still don't actually know he's dead and post a message directly through their newsfeed without looking at his profile.
It's pretty awkward but it's not my place to go and tell them (I don't know most of them) "FYI, he's dead"
I wonder, what if I wrote a script to keep generating trivial updates to my various feeds in case I die, maybe by sentence mixing and so on. How long would it take for people to notice.
This is why Facebook/Social networks cannot replace real life interactions. Maybe they weren't as close of a friend as you thought? If you don't hear from someone for two years and never make a phone call to reach out/or spend them with them, it sounds like they were more of an acquaintance than a real friend. I quit facebook back in April, and I can say that my friendships with true friends have been getting stronger ever since.
How is one related to the other? If it is true that he wasn't as close of a friend with the guy as he thought, what does that have to do with facebook? Without facebook he might not have had any interaction with the guy at all. How does quitting facebook help in that situation? I know in my situation there are lots of people on facebook that I wouldn't know anything about what they were doing if they weren't on facebook.
Quitting facebook will show you who your true friends are. It also allows you to focus on people that matter, and not people who are no longer a meaningful part of your life.
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.
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.
I mean no disrespect to the original author. It is just that online social networks use the term "friend" when it really doesn't apply.
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.
When my sister died it was a source of comfort to read her FB wall and see the nice things people wrote about her. I would think someone would have written on the OP's friend's wall that would give a clue that he had died.
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.
Says the guy who spends his effort and brilliance creating a site for entrepreneurs to meet.
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.
One of my coworker died of heart-attach two weeks ago. He had accepted meeting requests few hours before dying and had conversation with fellow co-workers. We couldn't believe that he is no longer alive.
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 haven't had this happen, but something similar. One of my friend's dad passed away while I was away for college. This was before Facebook and since we went to different schools I didn't end up finding out for 6 months or a year.
Great article same thing happened to me. I had an old friend that kept popping up in my mind and we briefly touched base to get together for a beer. I dropped the ball, and a couple of years went by, now he's gone for good.
Yeah, Facebook "friendships" are not the same (though it's handy for keeping up to date with people :) ).
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.
I de-activated my Facebook account a long while ago. going to reactivate to see who's still there and reach out to them with phone calls and emails. :( thanks for the reminder. Real Life.
I always thought to write instructions about how to delete everything I have on the Internet and ask a relative to share that written instructions to a friend. Now I'm unsure if I want this to happen...
Some time we involve in busy life and forget to meet our lover one, No day's Messaging,email,chat,FB decide our relationship. Why not we understand they are just source of contact not interaction.
I don't use social networks and my family is separate from my friends are separate from my colleagues.
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.
Surely I'm not the only one who read the screenshotted exchanges and thought:
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.
This was my thought too. The OP's friend seemed to be responding to each communication with leading statements and not once does it elicit a "tell me more" or "Oh goodness Mike, what's wrong? Is there anything I can do?"
It seems wrong to say both that he has the "social instinct of a cockroach" and that he's selfish (implying his oversight was a choice). I'm inclined to believe it's the former, given that he is making a post like this. Social instinct is not easy for many programmers, myself included. Your comment almost amounts to assigning blame via the butterfly effect.
edit: rewording my first sentence per comment below
