All That Remains

In 2012, Jamie Daugherty opened her Facebook account and saw that she had received a message from a beloved cousin. The cousin disclosed that she was moving to a new home—without her husband. "He is just too stern and aggressive," she wrote. "I need to be away from him." Daugherty replied, "If you need anything, ask and I'll do my best. Can't wait to catch up."

A couple of months later, Daugherty was stunned to learn that her cousin, along with her cousin's two young daughters, had been killed. The husband was arrested and ultimately convicted of their murder. In the wave of grief that followed, Daugherty found herself reaching out in the digital space where she and her cousin had so recently communicated. In public posts and private messages to the deceased woman's still-active Facebook account, she asked pained questions, expressed sadness, and voiced regret that they hadn't spent more time together:

"You and your beautiful girls will live forever because our love for you will always exist."

"The tears still come when I think of you being gone."

"I keep remembering all our youthful memories and how many ways I looked up to you."

"I fully knew that it wasn't her," Daugherty explained recently. But, as she put it, "So much of who we are gets shared on social media that it's almost a digital you. It feels as if a small part of her will hear my words."

Despite the sudden, tragic nature of the loss, Daugherty's impulse in its aftermath was not unusual. As with so many facets of life, social media has changed the way many of us experience death and bereavement; when someone dies, Facebook is frequently one "place" where those who knew and loved the deceased convene to express condolences and grief. Family and friends may create a group for sharing or request that Facebook designate the page of the deceased as a memorial ("Remembering Jane Smith"), preserving the person's online activity in digital amber. Visitors post poems, songs, and pictures of the deceased grinning in happy times. They expound on the person's admirable integrity, generosity, and kindness and write vivid remembrances of teenage antics, college road trips, and personal obsessions. Very often, people address their feelings directly to the dead: "I miss you like crazy." "We love you always and forever!" "Still can't believe u are gone."

In the hodgepodge of a Facebook feed—or on Instagram, Twitter, and other sites where users remember the dead—it can be jarring to see news about a person's death beside snapshots from last night's party or the latest viral video. Yet as contemporary as the phenomenon seems, rousing the memory of the dead via social media is more like a new twist on a primal human behavior. It may even represent a return of sorts to an older mode of grieving.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist and grief expert at Columbia University, points out that the kind of collective mourning that takes place on Facebook is "a lot like the way people used to honor the dead and grieve, which is as part of a large community." As death experienced via social media becomes ever more entrenched as a "new normal," researchers find that it can bring the bereaved much-needed comfort—as well as particular kinds of unease.

Holding On To The Dead

Communicating with the deceased in writing, thoughts, or speech is typical for the bereaved—and it started long before social media. "Talking out loud to the dead, especially at cemeteries, happens quite a bit," says Jocelyn DeGroot Brown, a communication researcher at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Typically, she explains, "people know that their loved one is dead, so they're talking to what's called the 'inner representation' of the deceased. The living think about how they believe the deceased would respond, and they give themselves feedback."

The fact that people now use social media to communicate with the dead is just a natural extension of this practice. Analyzing a collection of Facebook memorial groups created for adolescents killed in car crashes, clinical psychologist Elaine Kasket found that 77 percent of visitors' posts used the second-person voice, indicating that many address the deceased directly. "This is how digital natives are used to thinking: Once you put it out there, the person's received it," Kasket says. "People will say things like, 'If I talk to her at the grave site, I don't know whether she's hearing it. If I send a message, I'm pretty sure she gets that.'"

While some message senders may actually expect the dead to receive their words in an afterlife, not all hold that belief. For them, social media may act as a kind of "secular heaven," Kasket says, fostering the reassuring illusion that their loved ones linger somewhere—in this case, within the expanse of the Internet, where traces of them remain even after their corporeal self is gone. As long as the bereaved acknowledge that the deceased have in fact died, experts say, this kind of communication can be harmless and potentially helpful.

This is just one of the ways in which the living maintain continuing bonds with their loved ones, according to a theory developed by psychologist Dennis Klass and other researchers. Beyond direct communication, they identified survivors sensing the presence of the dead, turning to them for guidance, and talking about them with others—all widely evident on Facebook.

In talking about lost loved ones, the bereaved may seek to "complete the dead person's' identity, to write 'the last chapter' of their biography," Klass and sociologist Tony Walter wrote a few years before the birth of Facebook. Today, friends and family of the dead—including those who live far away or occupy different social spheres—can turn to social media to collectively remember and express appreciation for them and extract lessons from their lives and deaths.

"People who can make a coherent story about what happened cope much better with the death than people who don't," says Illene Cupit, a professor of human development at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. "When you go to a wake, or sit shiva if you're Jewish, you sit around and talk about the person. You make sense out of what happened. And people are doing that on social media."

Not only does social media encourage this kind of conversation, it extends it beyond the relatively brief period allowed by typical mourning rites. "We expect people to 'get over it' in a very short period of time," Cupit says. "By posting one's mourning experience on social media, it becomes more of a public event again, and it persists in time."

After Wendi Burkett's father died in 2013, conversations on Facebook helped her continue to learn about him and connect with others who had known him, long after his funeral was over. "It was profoundly healing to read about the impact he had on others and see how deeply loved he was," she says.

Sites like Facebook provide unobtrusive means for the bereaved to solicit support from others or simply express how they are feeling. Doing so in person can be awkward or stressful, both generally and for the young and socially anxious in particular, according to Cupit. As one user whose father passed away explains, "I want people to know I'm thinking of my dad and still grieving—without their feeling as though they have to say or do something, as in a face-to-face conversation."

Another thing social media offers the grieving that formal ceremonies may not is a chance to laugh. "Humor is not typically a big part of bereavement ceremonies, though it is in some cultures: There's the Irish wake, and in some African cultures people actually tell dirty jokes," says Bonanno, who explored the positive emotions associated with grief in his book, The Other Side of Sadness. "We've found that when people are reminiscing and show genuine laughs and smiles, that predicts a better adjustment over time."

The simple exchange of memories, thoughts, and pictures on social media—even funny or goofy ones—may have a supportive effect on those hardest hit, according to Bonanno: "There's an implicit sense that they're all bonding together. They're affirming their community."

A Double-Edged Sword

As the online experience of death expands, it presents a few conundrums. What if a Facebook user sees photos of a deceased friend in his news feed and isn't prepared for the feelings they stir up? Even those who want to keep a sense of connection with the dead sometimes prefer to shift their focus away from the loss, and online reminders can make it harder to do that, according to Kelly Rossetto, a communication researcher at Boston College. The very appearance of the deceased on social media can be unsettling. "I feel as if it's made him a ghost," one research participant told Rossetto and her colleagues.

Social media also exposes users indefinitely to the expressions of other mourners, whether they want the exposure or not. "It can make you doubt your own responses," Rossetto says. "'Am I doing too much? Am I doing too little? Am I showing the right emotions? Do I have to share my emotions on Facebook, even if I don't want to?'" People may differ and even argue over what tone and sorts of information are appropriate to the discussion. For some, grieving on Facebook seems inappropriate altogether. Site users complain of "bandwagon mourners," who insert themselves into the conversation despite having had little or no connection to the deceased.

Rossetto frames these drawbacks as a loss of control that can, at times, make the bereaved's experience more difficult. "Although Facebook offers a great space for support, it also challenges our privacy and ability to manage who we're talking to and seeing grieve," she says. "We can avoid people in life; we can't always avoid them as easily on social media." A moderate approach to social media use—and a reconfiguration of the settings for what might appear in one's feed—might mitigate the disturbances. Some people are creating alternative solutions: A new website called LifePosts, for example, allows users to curate, with more control, memorial narratives that blend the style of Facebook pages with more formal tributes.

Online grieving requires a balance between engagement and disengagement. It's also important to get support offline, Cupit emphasizes. In short, she says, "You can't get a hug on Facebook." But when a physical embrace is out of reach, kind words delivered online may be the next best thing.

"I want the memory of my husband to hold on," says Norma van Maaren, whose spouse died in a car accident. "Sometimes people forget that I'm still in pain. It's nice to be virtually hugged on the difficult days."