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Facebook and death

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mcbaseball10

mcbaseball10

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A childhood friend of mine passed away on Thursday night at the age of 30 in a 4-wheeler accident in Kentucky. Still hard to believe that it happened and it's just an awful tragedy for his family. I am really not sure how I feel about the subject and am still trying to wrap my head around it, but his Facebook page has become a bit of an obituary guest book where people are writing messages to my friend about how they will miss him and "thoughts and prayers are with him and his family." Does it make people feel better that they are writing directly to his actual page? I assume its not a bad thing because people can connect and share about his life, but I don't get it. Have any of you ever seen a person who passed away, have tons of people writing, "RIP friend," "You will be missed," etc. etc.? Does this bother anybody else or am I just a little too old-fashioned?
 
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I don't know about Facebook customs but, from a human standpoint, it seems like a completely natural and predictable reaction to me. That's what humans do, whether it's Facebook or setting up a shrine at the site of the accident or the home of the deceased or whatever. People get freaked out about death and start going supernatural, praying to various gods, talking to the deceased etc.

Does it make them feel better? Sure, in a small way. It makes them feel like they are doing something concrete and things aren't as totally out of control as they really are. There is psychological value in saying goodbye. In the case of this Facebook situation, his family seeing how many people really cared about him might be meaningful too.

I dunno.




Sorry about your friend.
 
A coworker's sister died in a car accident last year and they have this FB page for her, complete with pics that were probably part of her old FB profile. On the anniversary of her death my coworker posted a simple message on that page, asking people to share their memories/stories involving the girl, and people did.

I don't know how you turn a profile into a mere "page" - maybe they moved the stuff over manually - but in any case I thought it was kinda neat. People are more likely to post meaningful stuff on FB than they are to gather at the cemetary or some shit.

:dunno:
 
Given my propensity for searching for headline pages, I've seen it. It's a bit strange, but I don't think it is unexpected.

I have not had it happen to anybody I know though, no.

Sorry for your friend, McB.
 
Anything that helps the family cope is really ok.

One comment that was left was troubling to me though. Our friend was an Iraq and Afghanistan war veteran with the Marine Corp. However, he has been inactive with the service for the last several years. So a high school classmate of ours so intelligently writes on the page just hours after it happened (and before most people knew how his death had occurred):

"Was he in the helicopter crash?"

No, you dumb shit he wasn't. I guess a lot of it seems inappropriate to me.
 
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