The Death of My Facebook Friends

Saying goodbye to people you have never met

Goodbye Tim

Within five months I had to receive news about three friends’ deaths via Facebook. For one friend, his father let us know by writing a shattering post. “I am devastated to inform Tim’s friends that he has tragically passed away. I was the first person to ever hold him. He was my beautiful baby boy and I cannot believe I will never hold him again.”

I had no idea Tim had been ill, but he had been sending several of his friends rambling messages, sharing poetry he had written when he was an exchange student in Japan in the early 1990s and posting photographs of the Fijian woman he fell in love with when he was nineteen — an unrequited love that forever haunted him. It would not have been surprising if the last word to reach his lips had been “Melaia.”

So long Veronica

Then my friend Veronica was killed in a car accident. I’d seen on the TV news that a mother-of-four had died when her car skidded off the road and hit a tree but didn’t know it was Veronica until her husband posted the tragic news on her page. It was an awful way to find out — but I soon realized how great social media can be in times of death.

I joined the hundreds of people writing on his timeline, “RIP sweet Veronica, taken too soon. I’ll…