On July 17 last year, one of my most promising students died. Her name was Casey Feldman, and she was crossing a street in a New Jersey resort town on her way to work when a van went barreling through a stop sign. Her death was a terrible loss for everyone who knew her. Smart and dogged, whimsical and kind, Casey was the news editor of the The Observer, the campus paper I advise, and she was going places. She was a finalist for a national college reporting award and had just been chosen for a prestigious television internship for the fall, a fact she conveyed to me in a midnight text message, entirely consistent with her all-news-all-the-time mind-set. Two days later her life ended.
I found out about Casey's death the old-fashioned way: in a phone conversation with Kelsey, the layout editor and Casey's roommate. She'd left a neutral-sounding voice mail the night before, asking me to call when I got her message, adding, "It's OK if it's late." I didn't retrieve the message till midnight, so I called the next morning, realizing only later what an extraordinary effort she had made to keep her voice calm. But my students almost never make phone calls if they can help it, so Kelsey's message alone should have raised my antenna. She blogs, she tweets, she texts, and she pings. But voice mail? No.
Paradoxically it was Kelsey's understanding of the viral nature of her generation's communication preferences that sent her rushing to the phone, and not just to call boomers like me. She didn't want anyone to learn of Casey's death through Facebook. It was summer, and their friends were scattered, but Kelsey knew that if even one of Casey's 801 Facebook friends posted the news, it would immediately spread.
So as Kelsey and her roommates made calls through the night, they monitored Facebook. Within an hour of Casey's death, the first mourner posted her respects on Casey's Facebook wall, a post that any of Casey's friends could have seen. By the next morning, Kelsey, in New Jersey, had reached The Observer's editor in chief in Virginia, and by that evening, the two had reached fellow editors in California, Missouri, Massachusetts, Texas, and elsewhere—and somehow none of them already knew.
In the months that followed, I've seen how markedly technology has influenced the conventions of grieving among my students, offering them solace but also uncertainty. The day after Casey's death, several editorial-board members changed their individual Facebook profile pictures. Where there had been photos of Brent, of Kelsey, of Kate, now there were photos of Casey and Brent, Casey and Kelsey, Casey and Kate.
Now that Casey was gone, she was virtually everywhere. I asked one of my students why she'd changed her profile photo. "It was spontaneous," she said. "Once one person did it, we all joined in." Another student, who had friends at Virginia Tech when, in 2007, a gunman killed 32 people, said that's when she first saw the practice of posting Facebook profile photos of oneself with the person being mourned.
Within several days of Casey's death, a Facebook group was created called "In Loving Memory of Casey Feldman," which ran parallel to the wake and funeral planned by Casey's family. Dozens wrote on that group's wall, but Casey's own wall was the more natural gathering place, where the comments were more colloquial and addressed to her: "casey im speechless for words right now," wrote one friend. " i cant believe that just yest i txted you and now your gone ... i miss you soo much. rest in peace."
Though we all live atomized lives, memorial services let us know the dead with more dimension than we may have known them during their lifetimes. In the responses of her friends, I was struck by how much I hadn't known about Casey—her equestrian skill, her love of animals, her interest in photography, her acting talent, her penchant for creating her own slang ("Don't be a cow"), and her curiosity—so intense that her friends affectionately called her a "stalker."
This new, uncharted form of grieving raises new questions. Traditional mourning is governed by conventions. But in the age of Facebook, with selfhood publicly represented via comments and uploaded photos, was it OK for her friends to display joy or exuberance online? Some weren't sure. Six weeks after Casey's death, one student who had posted a shot of herself with Casey wondered aloud when it was all right to post a different photo. Was there a right time? There were no conventions to help her. And would she be judged if she removed her mourning photo before most others did?
As it turns out, Facebook has a "memorializing" policy in regard to the pages of those who have died. That policy came into being in 2005, when a good friend and co-worker of Max Kelly, a Facebook employee, was killed in a bicycle accident. As Kelly wrote in a Facebook blog post last October, "The question soon came up: What do we do about his Facebook profile? We had never really thought about this before in such a personal way. How do you deal with an interaction with someone who is no longer able to log on? When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of 'memorialized' profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who've passed."
Casey's Facebook page is now memorialized. Her own postings and lists of interests have been removed, and the page is visible only to her Facebook friends. (I thank Kelsey Butler for making it possible for me to gain access to it.) Eight months after her death, her friends are still posting on her wall, not to "share their memories" but to write to her, acknowledging her absence but maintaining their ties to her—exactly the stance that contemporary grief theorists recommend. To me, that seems preferable to Freud's prescription, in "Mourning and Melancholia," that we should detach from the dead. Quite a few of Casey's friends wished her a merry Christmas, and on the 17th of every month so far, the postings spike. Some share dreams they've had about her, or post a detail of interest. "I had juice box wine recently," wrote one. "I thought of you the whole time :( Miss you girl!" From another: "i miss you. the new lady gaga cd came out, and if i had one wish in the world it would be that you could be singing (more like screaming) along with me in my passenger seat like old times."
It was against the natural order for Casey to die at 21, and her death still reverberates among her roommates and fellow editors. I was privileged to know Casey, and though I knew her deeply in certain ways, I wonder—I'm not sure, but I wonder—if I should have known her better. I do know, however, that she would have done a terrific trend piece on "Grief in the Age of Facebook."
More than 277 2-year and 4-year colleges participated in The Chronicle's third annual Great Colleges to Work For Survey. Ninety-seven were recognized.
Comments
1. 22086364 - March 01, 2010 at 10:03 am
This was a fascinating and informative piece, and it left me mourning the loss of Casey Feldman, while also feeling like I'd like to give a hug to people like Kelsey Butler, who sought to make sure that people learned of Feldman's loss through more "mediated" ways than Facebook. They showed grace and kindness, despite their own pain.
2. sophieg - March 04, 2010 at 08:29 am
A lovely thoughtful piece, respectful and insightful. Thank you.
3. firstgenprof - March 04, 2010 at 09:12 am
This touched me profoundly. My son lost a close friend in a house fire last month. She was 18. She lived in Colorado. He was visiting Vancouver BC the night she died. He found out about her death from a phone call from a friend and called me right away. He then started communicating on facebook immediately. Because of the distance between me and my son, between my son and his friends, and between the young woman who died and her family, facebook allowed us all to reach out and share our grief. I learned more about my son and his friends and the close relationships they shared through their facebook posts and it helped all of us with the grieving process.
It has been five weeks since her death and it is still hard to believe we won't have her in our lives but my son has been able to deal with this tragic loss in a way that I would never have imagined. I'm thankful for the technology that allowed us to be with each other in spite of the distance that separated us.
4. mmccllln - March 04, 2010 at 10:04 am
Thank you, Dr. Stone, for a touching piece of writing. I, of course, have shared it with my Facebook friends. It somehow seemed appropriate to do that.
5. 11314967 - March 04, 2010 at 11:09 am
Elizabeth,
This is a touching and insightful remembrance. I'm grateful to you for writing it.
6. reharper - March 04, 2010 at 11:30 am
I appreciate this article and wish to share a related incident. Last January when my daughter was studying in Israel her grandmother died. While Grandma was 97 and her death was not a shock, it was very sad and was this girl's first loss. All I could think of was "how do I not have my daughter hear about this on Facebook?" After all, her sisters would be receiving condolence postings from friends. I realized that while I had no way to contact my daughter directly (she had only random, intermittent phone and internet access), I could not keep the news from her. So I contacted the college and we made a plan for how to help my daughter hear about and cope with this loss. She was able to light a candle in a Catholic shrine in Galillee (Grandma was Catholic). As faculty members and student affairs professionals, we need to be able to think on our feet (and on our electronic devices of all sorts) these days in order to support our students in new and meanningful ways. With 24/7 access to news, good and bad, personal and public, we as well as our students are now pushed to create responses that did not exist before.
7. 11182967 - March 04, 2010 at 11:48 am
But for me this is a reminder of why an older person often isn't as comfortable with social networks like Facebook and with the viral nature of the Internet in general. It appears that most of the comments posted about this young woman have been positive (maybe that's part of an unspoken protocol of this format), but even in death I would hope to retain some privacy. While the prospect of how others will see us--even, or perhaps especially, in retrospect--may always have affected behavior, many of us still believe that we have a right to privacy in certain areas of our lives, during those lives and even in memoriam. We already know that we can no longer say in an email what we once would have said in a letter or even on the phone or in a memo, and in this sense the very ease of communication is a censor none of us can ignore. Now we must be concerned that our entire lives are a keystroke away from knowledge by the world, even on our demise. Do we really want a world in which everyone's life as an entirely open book (or Iphone, as the case may be)?
On another note, this portends the death of gossip, which once it becomes so easily accesible may cease to become valuable currency. This is not necessarily the good thing it may appear.
And, more seriously, as we've learned from our students' undiscerning reliance on the validity of what they learn on the Internet (see that clever Presidents' Day for Dodge), the line between true and false, accurate and inaccurate, proved and not proved, often difficult and never quite absolute as it is, now becomes even more blurred. In a world where everything that is said and written seems to be owned by everyone (what's plagiarism?) and hence of equal value, how is it possible to make reasoned decisions about anything--or even to defend the notion that certain important decisions be based on reason at all? In a world operating under a sort of Gresham's Law of Communication, where all words have equal--low--value, we should be wary of the kinds of authority that will remain?
8. dpn33 - March 04, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Very nice article. From personal experience I know that learning of someone's death via Facebook is eerie and wrong. A colleague died last fall and as people learned of it, they began posting memories and sympathies to the Facebook statuses. So other colleagues who were not within ready reach, learned from these Facebook posts, it was a unpleasant shock. I had to interact with a number of colleagues who were confused and worried. It's a new world, though and Facebook is here no matter what we may prefer and people will share things that perhaps aren't theirs to share. So not only do we have to concern ourselves with our online lives, but be careful in our offline lives so that things we didn't want known don't find their way into other people's profiles.
9. timewaster123 - March 04, 2010 at 06:35 pm
While I appreciate the benefits of the medium, I personally wouldn't want to be remembered with text message spelling and such. A friend recently died and as he was a somewhat public figure as an artist, there was a long, sad and (I'm afraid) stupid and banal outpouring of sentiment on his facebook page. I am afraid I found this to be much more annoying than touching. Perhaps that's just me.
10. history_student1 - March 04, 2010 at 06:56 pm
I can't help but be reminded of Marsall McLuhan's dictum, "The medium is the message." Can we really say solemn things--the things appropriate to say at the time of a tragic death--through the medium of Facebook? Can Facebook be anything but trivial, banal, and ephemeral? There is nothing inherently wrong with triviality, banality, and emphemeralness, but they should not be mixed with serious reflection. Let Facebook do what it does best--serve as a conduit for superficial messages--and save true grief and reflections for a different context.
11. ais23 - March 05, 2010 at 09:14 am
For many, Facebook can be a place for solemn reflection. When a college classmate passed away in 2004 we did not pour our hearts out immediately on his page, which remained available. But on birthdays, anniversaries of his passing, would-be milestones and our own personal celebrations we write to him. We're scattered, and perhaps these are things we'd say to him at his grave. The "public" setting (really, just for friends--not the entire world) creates a safe space for us to continue to mourn together. No one should lose a friend at such a young age, and this process helped us cope. I couldn't ask for anything more.
12. jenwolf - March 05, 2010 at 11:10 am
I guess in chosing to voice one's grief in a public, ephemeral space like FB, one does run the risk of being judged as banal and stupid for one's expression. While I feel for those burdened by such superiority that they are, in fact, annoyed by expressions that lack the literary merit of the canon, I must say I also feel for those who've been so judged. Of course, they're most likely not withering under the scorn, being, I hope, blissfully unaware and continuing to enjoy art and artists, and each other, and their sometimes less than artful freedom to express themselves in this brave new medium.
13. history_student1 - March 05, 2010 at 01:55 pm
The point is not that, as jenwolf writes, expressions of grief on Facebook "lack the literary merit of the canon." Indeed, most expressions of grief lack such merit, and there is nothing wrong with that. The point is that the juxtaposition between serious grief and commercial advertisements, solemn mourning and status updates of the order of "Friend X is sooo happy right now" should be troubling. One cannot communicate philosophy through smoke signals, and it is exceedingly difficult--I stop short of saying impossible, with respect to ais23--to communicate grief in the public space of wall posts.
14. jschantz - March 05, 2010 at 03:52 pm
In June 2007, our son, Samuel Schantz died unexpectingly. He had just returned from a Taglit Birthright trip to Israel, and was planning on taking some time off before moving to Chicago. He posted on Facebook and Myspace almost daily, and he had intersecting universes of friends on each. Within a day or two, his friends had created a memorial site "In Loving Memory of Samuel Schantz", with many of his friends posting. That page, as well as his home page of Facebook are still up, as well as the Myspace page. My wife and I, as well as his friends and family, still post on those pages. Sometimes, his friends talk to him, ask for advice, or just say things to him. Most of the postings occur around his Yahrziet (anniversary) or his birthday. We still keep in touch with his friends through Facebook. It gives us comfort to see them growing up, graduating, and starting their adult lives, even though Sam never will. He would have graduated this year, and I'm certain would have started a Master's or law degree, as that was his passion.
So yes, it is a different way to grieve, but this is his generation, this is their lives - it's how they do things. Human history is rife with the yearning for life everlasting. If the internet evolves into a conscience intelligence, maybe all the memorialized will live forever in haze of electrons whizzing around cyberspace...
15. chroniclebarnacle - March 08, 2010 at 10:52 am
Re: post #9. timewaster123- apparently you do not have an ounce of sentimentality in you. The article was touching. So yes- it is just you- sadly.
16. bekka_alice - March 08, 2010 at 12:19 pm
Re: post #9 - it's not just timewaster123 but tw is missing something nonetheless - I have been to far too many funerals in my time, and certainly have had occasion to pause and wonder what on earth someone was thinking when they spoke or posted in response to a loss. But then, I've had the same kind of occasion to pause with some comments people have made at funerals and wakes as well. Not only with sad events, but with happy ones too, the things some people come up with are astounding (I watched several pews react in confusion once as a priest took ten minutes to compare the ongoing wedding ceremony to a football game his high school team had lost). I've been at wakes where someone questioned the deceased's dating choices in life, or talked about how it was a loss because of how "hot" the deceased was - more humorous after the fact than at the time. But if I skipped the funeral, the wake, or the wedding, I'd miss the soaring beauty of eulogies well crafted or the pure kindness of thoughtful sentiments as well. Human interactions naturally have both the best and the worst of us, Facebook is no different.