Death in the era of facebook.com

Last spring, a day like any other. Lecture, lab, then hours of reading in the library. But I came home that day to an email I'll never forget.

It was an automated invitation to a facebook.com group. Not for the political cause du jour or some party that weekend. It was an invitation to a group entitled "R.I.P. Josh D."

At first I thought it was a joke. He had flunked a class and was starting a group to make light of the situation or something odd like that. But as I clicked through and came to the news stories detailing the horrific car crash, reality set in.

Josh was a few years younger than me, three weeks shy of his high school graduation with plans to attend the University of Massachusetts in the fall. We had spent our summers at Camp Schodack, growing up together first as campers and then as staff. I hadn't seem him since the previous August — but when you've lived in the same dilapidated cabin, played the same Color War games and shared the same summer memories, there's a friendship that's not soon forgotten.

The Facebook group, and Josh's profile, provided a strangely public memorial for us to share our grief. Josh's wall soon filled with brief notes and long stories, expressing shock and sadness at the news, and giving us a chance to recount anecdotes from Josh's life. Most were written in the second person, as if Josh himself would be reading them: "i cant believe this ... i love you so much josh and miss you more than you can imagine," one friend wrote.

Josh's funeral came and went, but now, over five months since his death, Josh's friends are still writing on his wall. The posts have turned to the quotidian, as friends describe their daily lives, the concerts and parties they're going to, and their struggles in college without Josh. Even reading the wall provides a peculiar sort of catharsis for me, as it bears witness to the fact that there is a community of people out there who love and miss Josh too.

As the veil of immortality that seemed to surround my teenage years has been pulled back, I've had other friends pass away, from sudden accidents and longstanding medical conditions. Each time, the Facebook phenomenon has been replicated. The wall becomes a site of communal mourning, where friends come together to share their memories and their grief.

Around us all, young people die for tragic reasons but leave their internet persona behind. The Facebook pages of soldiers who have died in Iraq and the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting have served both as snapshots of the life of the deceased and as public memorial sites. With a few clicks of a button, day or night, you're plunged back into their lives, looking at their favorite books or browsing through their photo albums. And it's as if they were never gone. But they are. It's just that their Facebook pages, and the communities of support that develop around them, mean they will never be forgotten. Jason Sheltzer is a molecular biology major from St. Davids, Pa. He can be reached at sheltzer@princeton.edu.