How to Facebook when someone is hurting

An insiders take on proper Facebook death etiquette

In 2011 I had my first experience with death. Well — a Facebook death. A former classmate of mine had died in the early morning hours in a motorcycle accident. At the time I was in New Hampshire with my husband and father-in-law. We were already having an emotional weekend — this being the first time we’d visited their family condo since my mother-in-law died three weeks earlier. I was scrolling through Facebook and had — what nearly all of us have by now experienced — the shock as I scanned through RIP messages on my friend’s wall (this was the pre-timeline days).

I wondered what this said about friendships that death announcements were delivered on social media.

Seven years ago I felt a mixture of disgust and shame that I learned about Chris’s death through Facebook. I wondered what this said about friendships that death announcements were delivered on social media. This thought is almost laughable in 2019. I now see this type of news sharing as fairly routine, and I’m totally ok with it too. Twenty four hours after my sister died I wrote a post delivering the news. A day after that I had the more unpleasant experience of logging into her account to inform her Facebook…