How do people normally deal with being informed of a friends death?
Sometime last year, an old friend decided to take his own life after struggling to make it through mental illness and paranoia. Maybe we were not very close, but Ive knew his since my teenage years as a gamer, and sadly lost contact when I moved home and had a sort of falling out with the old circle of people I was in contact with.
As fate would have it, I by chance noticed his profile online and re-established contact in a friend list, and was able to strike up some conversation even right up to the month he was pronounced dead.
I regret the last chat logs were just meaningless mundane crap, and there was so much I wanted to talk about but never got the chance.
His last published article out of only 2 to his name showed a suspicious man with fictitious enemies he didn't need from postmen, to lawyers, to electricians, and even google search engine. Not from the same mind that was friendly, and talkative in the good old days.
Im over the worst of it now, but are there many others here who have had a rude shock through facebook when they suddenly notice a page has been archived as a memorial without you being told? it was especially distressing discovering the true reason why my messages were never being replied to
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Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.When my son died in his 30th year, I posted to his FB page and let people know I'd be archiving it after a couple of weeks but would be happy to interact with his friends if they wanted to know what had happened. No one responded, and so I archived the page after the indicated time frame, and then I had a couple people contact me, irritated that I had done so. I did not feel particularly bad for them; they had not reached out to my son for years and seemed to want to lay some sort of claim to him because they had known him a dozen years ago in high school. Maybe I should have left his page up longer, to give them more of a chance to process it, but I had trouble believing that much processing was really going on as I knew for a fact they'd been long out of touch, and it was clear they probably only checked his page every few months. That doesn't strike me as much of a loss for someone to process.
I'm not saying this is the case with you, in fact it's pretty clearly not. However ... it may give you a bit of perspective from the family side of things. There are people who knew me and maybe liked me 40 years ago in high school for example who would feel bad to find out about my demise (for some given values of "feel", "bad" and "feel bad" ) but let's face it, even my closest HS "friends" don't interact with me even on FB as much as a few people I barely remember from the same era. And beyond a couple of class reunions they remembered to inform me of, they haven't interacted with me at all in real life. Grief being a function of the degree to which the deceased was part of your everyday life, logically speaking I just don't take any professed grief very seriously from such people. It's more the standard-issue effect that someone who's now unavailable to you suddenly seems more attractive and interesting or worth thinking about.
FB is funny like that, it informs us about the thoughts and happenings of people we ordinarily would completely have lost touch with in the pre-Internet era, which can be seen as a wonderful thing or as kind of weird.
mordant
Level 8
Dec 16, 2018
1
I was considerably isolated for a time, even with the internet, it just was not easy to find people in your area with shared interests and clubs. social networks were in their prototype stage and most people never used them, so you had to either share a phone number or an email and maybe start a newsgroup. It never really occured to me to track down others from the past I may miss until after years, i decided to move home closer back to the old town and maybe see what others had been up to.
To be honest, I would not have been surprised to see them all superglued to the same chairs I left them in when I saw them last. In this case, I imagine i would have been wandering about his fate, since he only used facebook since 2015 and almost none of the same people as mutual friends.
It just felt so incredibly rude for facebook to allow messenger to operate towards people who are known to be dead. I thought I would say "by the way, im actually passing through the area this weekend, so maybe I will see you around" with no warning unless i manually went to his page - out of literally hundreds out there which I rarely manually open anyway aside from my own scrolling wall
there is no denying it is disheartening, even shocking. there is no one way people "usually" get over it, though. you just have to put it in the "bad things that happened" compartment of your mind, make as much sense of it as you can and understand that you are not in a position to understand fully. it was his life. you almost certainly could not have helped him. it wasn't your fault, and you can't be blamed for not knowing why he didn't reply to your messages, or for thinking ill of him briefly when he didn't. you didn't know.
g
genessa
Level 8
Dec 16, 2018
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