Some of My Facebook Friends are Dead

Facebook Friends for HO

Has this ever happened to you? You find out that one of your 600 Facebook friends has slipped the surly bonds of earth and social media and gone to the “other side”?

I’ve had it happen a few times already. And they weren’t the people that I kinda-sorta-knew-but-never-really-met. I’m talking about people who were a part of my life. Well, one of them, not so much. But I met him, sat in a room and conversed with him. Then BOOM. Dead.

And I had another friend, who, after his death, had a Memorial Facebook page created for him by some mutual friends. That was a couple of years ago, and I’m not quite sure how long the memorializing period is supposed to be, so I’ll just hang onto that one for now.

Godspeed.

Still another passed, and I noticed her family unfriended a bunch of us, retaining a core group. Which begs the question: How do you fail to make the cut of a dead Facebook friend’s Facebook friend purge? Is there a new section of the will dedicated to social media in the new millennia? “The following are friends I choose to keep, in the event of my untimely death…purge the rest!”

Why do those pages even exist at this point? Sure, I get the idea of leaving something there for a while for friends and family to look at as a reminder of the dear departed. Pictures, status updates and the like. It’s comforting.

But sometimes it’s a little disconcerting. I mean in an abnormal, paranormal sort of way.

The other day, one of my dead Facebook friends poked me.

What am I supposed to do, poke back? And then will they poke me again? How many times will we go back and forth poking away? I’ve gotta tell you, I’ve never been poked from the Great Beyond. It’s sorta cool, but mostly strange, and super unnatural. And I suspect it has to do with some unfinished business. I know she’s probably more than a little pissed that I never agreed to play Farmville with her.

I wonder if Steve Jobs has something to do with this. I’ll bet he’s up there conducting seminars on “Dead Booking To Freak Out Your Surviving Cohorts”. If you get any suspicious correspondence typed in elegantly and thoughtfully designed fonts, that’s how you’ll know for sure that Steve had an otherworldly hand in it.

That’s thinking different.

Don’t get me wrong, I think social media is an extraordinary thing. But when this life is over, when I no longer have a status, I’d like to think that I will no longer have a need for status updates, tweets, pins and Google chats. It’s all kind of exhausting, to be honest, and perhaps we were meant to spend eternity engaged in more peaceful pursuits.

I’d hate to think that there is a lot of pinging and binging going on up there…in the cloud.

Still, eternity is a very long time. And if we can’t make it through the supermarket check out line without checking our news feeds at least once, it’s going to be a long afterlife.

Do you suppose they have their own version up there? Version Infinity.0? And since there are no physical bodies, are they all Soulbooking? What are the emoticons like? Personally, I’d like to think that there’s no need for emoticons or excessive exclamation pointing up there. In a perfect afterlife, everyone would know what you meant, and there would be no misunderstanding.

The flaming all goes on in the other place.

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13 thoughts on “Some of My Facebook Friends are Dead”

  1. I only have one dead Facebook friend. I keep wondering if he faked his own death and is actually alive somewhere. Considering, though, that he was at least close to 90 when his time came, I don’t think that’s the case. He was a composer, so some of his admirers seem to be keeping his page going.

    It gives me pause, though, whenever I see a “like” or a message from him.

  2. Thanks a lot, Linda… Now, because of this, I will feel the need to go directly to every site when Facebook gives me that convenient options of wishing a happy birthday, in order to make sure these people are still with us… and I did so enjoy that FB short cut.

    No problems with the Myspace crowd. Tom effectively killed us all.

  3. I’ve lost several Facebook friends over the years and it always creeps me out when a reminder comes up about their birthday. Fb says to wish them a Happy Birthday! Yikes!!!

  4. I always unfriend those who die. I don’t understand why people would keep a dead person’s FB page active anyway. Seems too morbid for me! Loved this post!

  5. That is kinda’ spooky but maybe they were trying to connect with you, which would be cool not spooky! 😀 Myspace – remember that? – Used to have Deadspace.. All the Myspace users that had died.. It was really creepy..

  6. Hilarious! And sPoOkY to be “Poked” from the great beyond!
    I haven’t been poked, but people do post things on the walls of my FB friends that have passed, and even seeing THAT sometimes is weird.
    I saw someone post that if they knew ahead of time when they were going to die, they would pre-schedule a post on social media. To post AFTER they had passed. Now THAT is pretty funny. Depending on what you posted. I would continue to post tacky jokes, or an occasional “Boo!’

  7. This has happened to me, too… and I find that these faces pop up when I least expect them. Always causes me to stop and ponder a bit.

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