Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Here is another piece on the use of facebook in the face of grief and loss.

If you haven’t had a friend die in the age of Facebook yet, you will.

I’m sorry about that.

It changes things, the Facebook part.

First of all, unless you’re extraordinarily close to the person, chances are really good that Facebook is where you’ll first hear the bad news. That’s what happened to me recently.

It’s not unusual for a high school friend to break out the scanner and upload some (usually embarrassing) old photos to Facebook. But when I logged into my account to see this one, I noticed the photo I was tagged in — pictured with one of my high school best friends — was oddly reminiscent and written entirely in the past tense.

Only then did I see the message from another friend telling me to call anytime day or night — she had something to tell me about a dear friend of ours that she didn’t want me to hear about on Facebook. Too late.

The details of his accident, while heartbreaking, aren’t what I want to talk about here. It’s the other details that haunt. It’s the fact that I now have a living, digital record via Facebook messages of the number of times (three over three years) that he tried to initiate an outing together.

It never succeeded because of schedules (mostly mine). It’s the fact that I know the exact last time I talked to him: two lines in June 2011.

Then there’s everyone else on Facebook who knew him. I can see exactly what they’re thinking and feeling, too. Because we’re all gathering at the same virtual wake — his Facebook wall, of course. Drowning out his everyday-life posts from just days ago, the wall now truly lives up to its name for the first time as it becomes a surface for us to scratch our memories onto: photos, songs, letters to him.

PAINFULLY PERSONAL

And here’s another thing you’ll need to know when this happens to you: Looking at this wall is going to feel like looking into the windows of your neighbors’ house when they’re doing something private. Friends you know, friends you don’t, will post agonizingly personal messages here, filled with inside jokes and references and raw grief and Bible verses. They’ll talk directly to him as if he’s still regularly checking his Facebook account (and far be it from me to say he isn’t, I guess). They’ll use emoticons rendered even more meaningless than usual. You will, too, because what else is there to do?

You’ll want to look away, but you won’t. It’s a well of fresh grief, comfort and old memories you can keep going back to as often as you like — probably more often than is healthy.

And if you go back far enough, wade through all the outpouring and make it back to a time before everything changed, you reach … an eerie kind of normal. Posts about basketball, music, dinner, life. Like when a funeral procession on the highway gradually bleeds into regular old traffic again. You can’t stay here, though. Refresh. You’ll see that funeral details are posted on the wall, too. How did we do these things before Facebook?

RAW LIFE LESSON

Here’s where, if you’re a social media marketer like I am, you might not be prepared for any of this. My world of social media is one of community at a distance — breezy, light conversations about what Google is up to or how to get your brand on Pinterest. Everything’s vetted, optimized, A/B tested. When the real world crashes in on a wave of tragedy, it’s a raw lesson in what Facebook is really for: connecting people, a messy business in life.

Facebook is about connecting people, but the people still have to do the rest. Spending as much time on Facebook as I do, I thought I was keeping up with my old friend. I “liked” his photos, I commented on his status once in a while. That was enough for me, but it shouldn’t have been.

Now I’ve missed the chance to be his real friend again, and I’ll be reminded of it every time I check my Facebook messages.

Because living through Facebook, as it turns out, isn’t real living after all.

Dying on Facebook, though, is all too real.

 

Courtney Seiter is social media manager at Raven Internet Marketing Tools in Nashville, Tenn. She has been a writer and editor for more than a decade at publications including Allure, Time Out: New York and The Tennessean. She regularly writes about social media and marketing at Raven’s blog (http://raventools.com/blog/), Marketing Land (http://marketingland.com/) and Social Media Club (http://socialmediaclub.org/).