13 ms·

A friend died nearly 2 years ago. I had no idea

360 points by alexcaps 13y ago

parsnips 13y ago
Sucks. I had a friend/mentor pass and not find out for two years as well. I went to his blog, and was wondering why he never finished his house remodeling project... Found his wifes blog and found out about his year long fight with cancer. Life is precious.
- mathattack 13y ago
  Indeed. When my 10 year high school reunion came, we were surprised by several "Who knew?" instances of people passing away. It was always people 2 removed. With social media the amount of people 1 removed is closer, and it's easier to contact folks, but it's still a surprise to hear about young folks in that "see every year or so category" go. It's a shame when it's cancer.
jyz 13y ago
Wow. This almost makes me want to reactivate my facebook. Powerful post, bravo!
- buro9 13y ago
  Strange, it makes me feel glad I actually phone my friends.
  - GFischer 13y ago
    Yeah, Facebook "friendships" are not the same (though it's handy for keeping up to date with people :) ). I at least have learned to post a "curated" version of my life online (after I was shown it wasn't good to share everything, even though I do tend to be quite open by default), and I assume many do the same, so you're not learning what's really happening with peoples' lives.
- harrygold 13y ago
  I de-activated my Facebook account a long while ago. going to reactivate to see who's still there and reach out to them with phone calls and emails. :( thanks for the reminder. Real Life.
snoonan 13y ago
Too true and common. A friend of mine in sales taught me to make sure you reach out to everyone who matters to you in some fashion on a regular schedule. To put it on your calendar. I never gave it much thought outside business, but it's something I'm going to start doing.
weeksie 13y ago
I come from a fishing town in Alaska and a year or so ago all of the people from my hometown started to show up on Facebook. I had been away for a very long time, lived all over the world, and only just started to get back in touch with my roots. Fishing is dangerous work. Over the last year I slowly learned how many people had died. I learned about more when I finally went back up to visit. The fisherman's memorial was a tough thing to walk by. It was even tougher to hear that people I had loved had died one, two, five years earlier and I had no idea. Life is short. Maintain those friendships.
clarky07 13y ago
I haven't had this happen, but something similar. One of my friend's dad passed away while I was away for college. This was before Facebook and since we went to different schools I didn't end up finding out for 6 months or a year.
noonespecial 13y ago
As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.
- stmchn 13y ago
  It's very unsettling. I'm still in college but I've had a couple friends who have passed. I just don't have the heart to unfriend their accounts. Once in a while, I'll be browsing Facebook and their account will pop up. Some other friend will comment on their page or something like that, and for a brief instant, you think they're still alive somehow (which makes no sense of course) before you realize it's just someone interacting with their page.
- LanceH 13y ago
  And the post-death messages that they like Ikea, or Chipotle, which are spooky, weird and tacky, all at once.
  - stmchn 13y ago
    It really gives "famous last words" a whole new meaning since all your tweets and Facebook statuses are forever immortalized. It makes me wonder what seemingly mundane thing will be the last thing people see from me on social media and will in turn be the first thing people see on my page when they find out I'm dead. It reminds me of Cory Monteith's (from Glee) recent passing. His last tweets were, "what the crap is Sharknado" "oh. IT'S A SHARK TORNADO." Just seems so odd to be remembered that way.
    - Nicholas_C 13y ago
      Very. Before my best friend passed, that morning his final tweet was "Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die." He died in a drunk driving accident in which he was the passenger several hours later that afternoon.
garbagewatch 13y ago
Why in holy hell is this on hackernews?
stmchn 13y ago
This happened with the first friend I ever made taking my CS degree. We were in a lot of classes together and corresponded on a semi-regular basis on Facebook over school breaks and things. I had talked to him a couple months prior to this school year starting, but once I got back and noticed he wasn't in any of the classes we were supposed to have together, a mutual friend of ours informed me that he had committed suicide over the summer. It was so jarring that just a few months had passed and he was gone. I looked back on our Facebook messages. I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. The last thing he had sent me was some funny cat gif and I hadn't responded. I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. > I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow. In case you're still harboring any sense of guilt over this, please don't. You are not responsible for your friend's death. This is a common reaction when a friend or acquaintance commits suicide; it's normal, but don't let it get the better of you.
- verisimilidude 13y ago
  I'm familiar with this feeling. It was around Christmas 2009, back in my middle-of-nowhere hometown. We got the old high school posse back together for the first time in 7 or 8 years. Everyone was doing pretty well on their own terms, from my one friend running his repair shop, to my other friend finishing up at an elite law school, to my own international adventures. All of us, except one. Despite getting an MBA, this dude was totally stuck in a rut, unemployed and somehow marooned back in our shitty hometown. I already had plans to return later in January and told him I'd give him a call. By the middle of January, he was gone. I've always wondered if my failure to set up plans to meet with him contributed to his depression and ultimate demise—if there's anything I could've noticed or done to stop it. Probably not, because he had lots of other problems. But I think the thought is always going to follow me.
fusiongyro 13y ago
I deleted and recreated my Google account recently. Some deceased friends of mine have "added me". An unsettling feeling.
AznHisoka 13y ago
I've had this happen to in the past. I may be cynical but I think most people just don't care enough about cultivating friendships with you, especially post-college. We just become too preoccupied with our jobs, family, obligations, etc. Even when we do have time to connect, we rather just sit in the couch and watch Breaking Bad instead.. too much effort. So yes, OP's thoughts are nice, but in the end, most of us just fall back to old habits.
Afforess 13y ago
This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.
- fourspace 13y ago
  Any suggestions on how to actually do this?
  - Fuzzwah 13y ago
    http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-digital-afterlife-with.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-dig...
  - Afforess 13y ago
    There are several services of varying levels of service, but honestly it's not that hard to write up a small script to fire off an email to get you to turn off the switch for a month. After multiple failures it assumes you are dead and sends a payload email to a trusted friend. You can easily prepay up a good sum on most hosts, aws, digital ocean, etc. plenty of good low-cost mail apis too, like mailgun.
  - StavrosK 13y ago
    http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is what I wrote years ago to do it. Make sure your messages don't scare people too much, in case you forget to check in/don't get the emails, though.
    - jacquesm 13y ago
      One thing that always kept me awake about this idea is the fear of false triggering.
      - StavrosK 13y ago
goshx 13y ago
This reminds me of what I saw a couple weeks ago on Facebook. I saw a friend's birthday popping up on FB. Then messages to that friend sending wishes of happy birthday and good health, peace, and everything else people wish you on your bday, started popping up on my timeline. The problem was: she died two months ago. I didn't know exactly how to feel about that... The funny thing is that this happened in a small town (13k people), where everybody knows each other. That's when I decided to remove my birth date from FB. That is about the only time most of your "friends" will remember that you (may still) exist.
- CodeCube 13y ago
  I'm fine with acquaintances that don't really correspond with me when my birthday rolls around. However I explicitly don't wish anyone a happy birthday over facebook. If it's someone that's important to me, I will make it a point to either text them, call them, or otherwise arrange to meet up with them in person. Otherwise, I leave it unsaid.
United857 13y ago
Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era. You don't need to reach out to your friends anymore, instead, we just consume each other's broadcasts.
- wmeredith 13y ago
  This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.
  - IvyMike 13y ago
    Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you". Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.
    - wmeredith 13y ago
      I agree. Now change the tile of this article to, "A distant friend died two years ago and I didn't know about it." And no one clicks.
      - yayadarsh 13y ago
        I don't see the point of this. Isn't distant friend a subset of "friend" as a group? This seems unnecessarily cynical about the title of this post.
      - Osmium 13y ago
        There's emotional distance and there's physical distance. I have been very close to people who are now very far from me. The fact that we don't get to speak often these days says nothing about the quality of the bond. Still very sad...
    - lostlogin 13y ago
mangeletti 13y ago
That was a really good article, and really sad. This happened to me recently, as well. I hadn't spoke with my best friend from Junior high in years (since I was 18), and I looked him up this past winter... died in Iraq (in 2006!), in an attack on his convoy. The reports were mixed. He either died by gun fire while defending the convoy after the initial attack, which was a road-side bomb, or he died as a result of the road-side bomb. It was the weirdest feeling, because I was sure I could have him on the phone in less than 1 day, and we'd be reminiscing about all the fun times we had back in the day, etc., and have some sort of "let's do that sometime soon" plans before the call was over. I was wrong. What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days... I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys. This happens to the best of us. In itself, it does not make you a terrible friend. > What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days. You never know - she may be happy to hear from you regardless.
ffrryuu 13y ago
Be proactive about your health. lef.org is a great resource even if they are selling stuff to you...
Aldo_MX 13y ago
I always thought to write instructions about how to delete everything I have on the Internet and ask a relative to share that written instructions to a friend. Now I'm unsure if I want this to happen...
djhworld 13y ago
Man that last paragraph sent shudders down my back
racl101 13y ago
Dayum. That was weird story man. My condolences. Makes you wonder why your friend didn't reach out in his final days.
shanselman 13y ago
I have a friend who died a year ago and I still keep her in my Gchat. I don't want to remove her.
- stretchwithme 13y ago
  I have a friend that died 11 years ago and still have him in my address book and have a birthday reminder for him too.
- elehack 13y ago
  My Ph.D adviser (who was also a close colleague, mentor, and friend, very much not Ph.D's Prof. Smith) died this summer. One of the most acute grief triggers early on was seeing him in my chat roster (and shared Google Docs, calendar events, etc.).
TheSwordsman 13y ago
I had the same thing happen with a friend of mine who had moved. Her and I kept in touch periodically, and we'd always catch up and complain about the dumb shit going on in our lives. I hadn't heard from her in awhile, and her not responding back via text messages was always weird. I then checked out her facebook and saw all of the wall posts and lost my shit. What I wouldn't give to just have five more minutes to complain about the dumb shit one final time. Now and again, I see stuff related to her show up on facebook and I just kind of stop and think for a bit.
personlurking 13y ago
My mother passed just after I graduated from high school in the late 90s and although it was pre-FB (et al) and she wouldn't have been into social networks, I do wish there was something that recorded who she was...her moving about, her voice, something. A bunch of her friends ransacked her house for her things, which I was told they (my mother and them) had previously agreed upon in the case of her death, and so when I got there, there was almost nothing left of her things. I can't remember her voice anymore so, in that sense, having a FB profile of hers wouldn't do it for me but a Youtube video would. That would be nice.
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > I can't remember her voice anymore This has to be the saddest thing I've read in this whole thread.
- kelnos 13y ago
  I'm in a similar boat. My mom passed away in 2001, and I have very few digital reminders of her (mainly just a few emails, but she never really got into the whole internet thing). She wasn't one to be photographed often, and even if she had been, I didn't get my first digital camera until a year or so after her death. I'm trying right now to recall her voice, and I'm having a lot of trouble doing so clearly. As much as a posthumous online presence could be unsettling, I really wish I had more tangible things to remind me of her.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
And on the other side of weird, I got a request from a person to introduce them to someone in my LinkedIn contacts list that I knew had passed. I passed along the information so they could be informed but realized that no doubt this person was getting emails from recruiters and such. Got the image of someone laying dead in their casket with their phone humming incoming calls/texts. I have stated in my will that my executor will put an indication about my demise on any social media accounts that folks might visit. And I included a signed letter authorizing said social media outlets to allow them to do so in my absence. Strange thing to have to include but it is the new world.
kabdib 13y ago
I lost a friend about a year and a half ago. He just stopped responding to email, and I found out he had died about two months after. Pancreatic cancer is a bitch -- he was gone in about three months, and he was (a) busy as fuck wrapping stuff up and (b) very sick for much of that period. He had all he could handle. I did get to go to a memorial for him a few months later. I still miss him; one of the best programmers I know, and he got me into motorcyling 25 years ago.
zimmru 13y ago
When my sister died it was a source of comfort to read her FB wall and see the nice things people wrote about her. I would think someone would have written on the OP's friend's wall that would give a clue that he had died. The other thing that's been nice is that we were able to find my sister's FB password, and were able to post her obituary. We continue to post pictures of her two young daughters she left behind.
Timothee 13y ago
Of course, this has happened for as long as people have been able to travel. Before the Internet, you'd move to a different city, and maybe you'd keep in touch with some people but for the most part, you'd never know what happened to most people you knew. Because as soon as they moved or changed their phone number, getting back in touch was limited or involved a certain amount of research. The difference now is that people who are in the acquaintance-Internet friend spectrum can still be reached easily with an email, a tweet, an instant message… if you wanted to. So they always feel kind of "there" even if you don't actually communicate with them. Until, like the author, you try to reach out and they don't reply back. It's kind of an interesting thing of online "friends": you can be in touch with somebody in a chat room or a forum for years and feel like you know them well (at least in the context, you've known them), but they can just disappear one day and you won't know if it's because they died or just moved on to other things. I was thinking about that about a guy I've been playing Words with Friends for probably three years. I only play with him because I know we're about the same level and it's hard to find players like that. (we were matched randomly) But I don't know anything about him except for his first name, most likely his birth year (based on his username) and possibly the fact that he lives on the East Coast based on the time he plays his turns. If he were to stop playing, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from him being dead. It's a strange thing.
Sam121 13y ago
Some time we involve in busy life and forget to meet our lover one, No day's Messaging,email,chat,FB decide our relationship. Why not we understand they are just source of contact not interaction.
DanBC 13y ago
A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily". The online stuff is a bit hard for me to deal with. She had a friendster page, but not Facebook. There's a memorial, and some other snippets floating around. There's a glimpse of her in a Moloko video, and another (shorter) glimpse in the video of the Smith's last concert. I get no comfort at all from that memorial page, and it left me pretty much anti the idea of them. There's quite a lot of misinformation about her life, and her death, but she's dead and people close to her were grieving so I just ignored it and kept quiet. But it makes reading that stuff very hard. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI) (http://www.a-free-guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1 http://www.a-free-guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1) (http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all-dayer-happening-this-saturday-r1570 http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all-day...) (http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn-davis-r478 http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn-davis...)
- chimeracoder 13y ago
  > A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily". As someone who has been in the same situation (though in my case my friend survived), I am very sorry for your loss. I still have nightmares sometimes about that experience - hearing the authorities bark orders into the phone on one end, hearing her scream at me, calling me a "traitor" when she realized I'd divulged her plans that she told me in confidence[0]. I even remember the exact song that I had been playing in the background (to give background noise, so she wouldn't realize I was on the other line) - I haven't been able to listen to it since. Back to the topic, though: I'm in the opposite situation. This former friend and I haven't spoken in many years (for unrelated reasons), and it would cause a lot of problems in our social networks if we reconnected. Still, every now and then (perhaps once a year or so), I am reminded of her and have the inclination to check in on her. We're not Facebook friends, but thanks to Twitter, her public blog, etc., it's easy for me to see that she's alive and well[1]. I'm not sure how I would react if I checked one day and found that she had passed on, whether by taking her own life[2], or from "natural" reasons. It would certainly be very difficult emotionally to handle seeing remnants of her life all across the Internet, almost all of which have been generated after the last time we spoke in person. [0] I pride myself on my integrity in general, but I don't regret my actions here. (She apologized later, for what it's worth). [1] for some definition of "well". [2] given the aforementioned history, there is a non-zero chance of this
BigChiefSmokem 13y ago
My aunt died last year and for a while I was getting requests from Zynga on fb that she was inviting me to play games with her. A lot like this thread, it hit me right in the feels :(
EmmaWatson 13y ago
sejje 13y ago
I had a friend die and I didn't find out for about 400 days. I was very upset, though I only knew this man via the internet...but we had been close friends for nearly a decade before having a falling out. He had cystic fibrosis and went from perfectly healthy to dead in about four days. His father and friends have taken up his various online presences--facebook, website, twitter. It's a neat little community that formed around him, even in his absence.
eyeareque 13y ago
This is why Facebook/Social networks cannot replace real life interactions. Maybe they weren't as close of a friend as you thought? If you don't hear from someone for two years and never make a phone call to reach out/or spend them with them, it sounds like they were more of an acquaintance than a real friend. I quit facebook back in April, and I can say that my friendships with true friends have been getting stronger ever since. passive relationships are not genuine.
- gohrt 13y ago
  This is such a shortsighted and cruel thing to say.
  - mildtrepidation 13y ago
    That's one way to look at it. Another is that, perhaps, Facebook's redefinition of the term "friend" has taken some of the meaning out of it. This leaves us in an emotionally precarious position: I've called someone a friend, and perhaps even interacted with them more than I would've otherwise, thanks to this online facilitation. Does that make it more or less important? Does the difference matter? I don't think these are trivial questions. My opinion is that, no, someone you talk to infrequently on Facebook is not your "friend" in the same way as someone you see and interact with regularly outside of the webbynets. But I do think that point of view, if it isn't already, will soon be outdated. For better or worse, our online interactions are more numerous and significant. Perhaps it's time we consider that possibility and start re-evaluating our assumptions regarding friendship, what it entails, and what it requires.
  - MrZongle2 13y ago
    How so? I think eyeareque is correct. In the days before the Internet, there were generally three ways to stay in touch with distant friends: writing letters, making telephone calls, or visiting in person. All three required varying degrees of time and effort on ones part, but this was offset by the simple pleasure of conversing with a friend. People didn't bother engaging in this sort of activity with acquaintances or "rather pleasant kinda-friends", because the personal connection didn't exist. There was no "payoff" significant enough to offset the effort. The likes of Facebook remove most of this time and effort requirement. You can "friend" people you haven't spoken to in years or even decades with a minimum of difficulty. While I'm sure there are plenty of cases where the lack of communication could be due to external causes (divorce, reassignment, death, job loss, etc) there are undoubtedly many more cases where people simply "drifted apart" because they found they didn't have strong common interests. Many Facebook (and similar social media) relationships really aren't "genuine" (as eyeareque stated) for this reason. Neither party really is interested in putting additional effort into the relationship beyond a simple "like" button click every now and then, if even that. The OP's story is sad, and while I agree with their summary that we should treasure our friends and family while we have them, let's not pretend that the Golden Age of Social Media has somehow provided us with a revolutionary relationship tool. Facebook is a dynamic, 21st Century version of the old "phone number and address book": full of people to whom you might send a Christmas card, but little else.
rbanffy 13y ago
Years ago, when Facebook was new and Orkut was taking its first steps, I decided to, once more, look up a good friend of my early computing career. He was one of my first BBS-friends, helped me set-up my first PC compatible, lent me an external hard-drive and taught me a lot about programming. By the time I finally found him, I realized he died six months before. We take our friends for granted. They are not.
skdjf 13y ago
Really scared of this one ... http://xkcd.com/686/ http://xkcd.com/686/
mildtrepidation 13y ago
Having lost -- I think? -- a friend whom I had before the advent of "friend me on FB," I can tell you there are more ambiguous, stranger ways to lose a friend, and they involve not finding out. I don't actually know he's dead. I only know that none of our mutual friends have heard from him, and that he was fighting with almost-certainly-terminal cancer to begin with. The supremely interconnected world of social media has certainly created problems. But there are other circumstances that people don't understand as well, situated some time between "all we have is the postal service" and "all we had was email" that don't even give you the closure of an obviously-defunct Facebook account or the direct reassurance of other friends/relatives. Many people here might not realize that before this sort of issue there was an entirely different one, and it ends with... well, it doesn't end. Which is really the problem.
cubsink 13y ago
One of my best friends committed suicide and I didn't know it for like a month or two. Got called up by another friend that told me. Even if me and another friend were his best pals, we weren't even invited to the funeral but went anyway. He still have a facebook account and a memorial page. I however managed to go around the problem by deleting my facebook account. Not for that reason though.
PaulHoule 13y ago
I've had people worry if I was dead when I stopped writing to certain social media accounts.
ahoyhere 13y ago
Surely I'm not the only one who read the screenshotted exchanges and thought: He just told the OP he's waiting for "answers" from the doctor. He can't make travel plans. He says it's long, gruesome, UGH. Guys. In case you have the social instinct of a cockroach, this is what they call A SIGN. Not a subtle one, either. That is when you LEAP to care for your friend. Here's what you do. You ask: Wait a minute, forget about whatever it is I wanted to talk about -- what's wrong? Are you okay? Do you want to talk? Why don't I come visit you instead of expecting you to travel? Alas, the author just glossed forward with "Well if you decide you can make it, let me know!" The sick (now dead) friend expressed well wishes for health to the OP, only to receive what kind of well wishes in return? None. Not even "good luck with your doctor's visit that I don't want to ask about cuz I'm not comfortable expressing feelings." How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"? > "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend." Yes, but not because you didn't know he died. But because you didn't care enough to notice or ask while he was alive.
- knice 13y ago
  This was my thought too. The OP's friend seemed to be responding to each communication with leading statements and not once does it elicit a "tell me more" or "Oh goodness Mike, what's wrong? Is there anything I can do?"
- sage_joch 13y ago
  It seems wrong to say both that he has the "social instinct of a cockroach" and that he's selfish (implying his oversight was a choice). I'm inclined to believe it's the former, given that he is making a post like this. Social instinct is not easy for many programmers, myself included. Your comment almost amounts to assigning blame via the butterfly effect. edit: rewording my first sentence per comment below
  - awj 13y ago
    > You can't simultaneously say that he has the "social instinct of a cockroach" and that he's selfish. I'm pretty sure you don't need social skills to be self-centered.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
I've long thought that somebody should write an app called "recycle me" for folks, like me, that post a lot on social media. It could just run your posts again in a loop, much like TV does reruns. If you had ten years or more of posts, it might even accomplish something like a poor man's immortality: you'd always be interacting with people, even people that weren't alive when you died. One can even imagine this being two-way: taking this to the next level by analyzing your online conversations and extrapolating what sorts of votes and comments you might make on new posts.
- tjr 13y ago
  After playing with CleverBot for a while a few years ago, some colleagues and I created a clone that we chatted with, training it for months. Chatting with it now is a lot like chatting with one of us. Granted, it doesn't always make sense, but the style of responses comes through.
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    For people who post online heavily, I don't think this is as far away as some might believe. Sure, it's not going to convince folks you're still alive, but it might provide entertainment to the great-great-great grandkids, let them know what you were like.
    - socksy 13y ago
      This idea (taken to its extreme) is the premise for a Black Mirror episode: http://vimeo.com/61215171 http://vimeo.com/61215171
meerab 13y ago
One of my coworker died of heart-attach two weeks ago. He had accepted meeting requests few hours before dying and had conversation with fellow co-workers. We couldn't believe that he is no longer alive. His name is still displayed on my frequently chatted contact list. The thought of pining him or e-mailing him has crossed my mind so many times..
alexcaps 13y ago
It means a lot to see everyone's comments and thoughts. Thank you. - OP
Sukotto 13y ago
Around The Corner Around the corner I have a friend, In this great city that has no end, Yet the days go by and weeks rush on, And before I know it, a year is gone. And I never see my old friends face, For life is a swift and terrible race, He knows I like him just as well, As in the days when I rang his bell. And he rang mine but we were younger then, And now we are busy, tired men. Tired of playing a foolish game, Tired of trying to make a name. "Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim Just to show that I'm thinking of him", But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes, And distance between us grows and grows. Around the corner, yet miles away, "Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today." And that's what we get and deserve in the end. Around the corner, a vanished friend. -- Charles Hanson Towne I've had this happen to me. And it really hurts. Partly from the reality of death, and partly because it's so easy to play the what if game. What if I'd called any of the many times I thought about doing so? How would things have been different? As far as I know, there are no do-overs. So make a point of keeping in touch with the people you care about.
memsom 13y ago
When I was in my early 20's I had an intense email friendship with a girl I met in alt.music.nirvana. Her name was Michaels, and if you search hard enough, you can still find her Usenet posts on Google Groups. We lived on opposite sides of the world, but we kept in touch for over 2 or so years. Then she moved out of home, had no internet access and we list touch. One of the worst days of my life was the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. Not because it was the day he passed on, but because of what I found. I tried to look her up. I felt she must have found the internet again. It had been some years since my last search. Sadly I discovered that I was never going to get a chance to speak with her ever again, because she had died in 2001, 3 years earlier. I managed to speak to her family, and her father told me that he had often wondered what had become of me. It's still hard to deal with. I have a reminder for her Birthday and the day she passed. It's a weird one really.
jroseattle 13y ago
This has happened to me a few times, now. Friends from high school and college passing away far too soon. At the time, I knew them well and we were very close. Of course, growing up and moving away and life progression takes you away from those you knew early in life to those late in life. My friends were all Facebook users, and I knew them before FB existed. We were connected through those services, but we didn't really communicate. They were wonderful people, all of them, and every time I learned of the news of their passing, it was through Facebook. My parents still read the newspaper, looking for the news about "who died". (They are also interested in the weather, but that's about it.) Nowadays, it seems social media is our generation's obit distribution system. In the end, I'm thankful for their images on Facebook. Even though we were no longer "daily" friends, I still miss them.
spiritplumber 13y ago
I wonder, what if I wrote a script to keep generating trivial updates to my various feeds in case I die, maybe by sentence mixing and so on. How long would it take for people to notice.
jbogp 13y ago
I have had a similar experience with a friend who died very young (probably suicide although I've never had confirmation). Anyway now every year a bunch of people still post something for his birthday some comments are followed by RIP others are not. I suspect some of these people still don't actually know he's dead and post a message directly through their newsfeed without looking at his profile. It's pretty awkward but it's not my place to go and tell them (I don't know most of them) "FYI, he's dead"
tobych 13y ago
Kinda had this happen. My ex-partner and close friend - "my rock" as I called her - Amanda "Moo" Hearn died a few years ago, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'd not called her for a couple of months. Kept meaning to. Then I suddenly had this urge to know how she was, and called, but the number had been disconnected, I think, so I called her sister who said "Oh, I'm so sorry Toby, Moo died yesterday." So yes, that Charles Hanson Towne poem (elsewhere on this thread) rings true for me. I email friends and call them occasionally and flippantly say "Hey, you're alive!" (I moved to the US six years ago and haven't been in touch quite like I used to be) and they don't realize I actually mean it. I hold a lot of guilt inside, dreading learning of another friend's death in a similar manner. Good to read this thread.
pstack 13y ago
I don't use social networks and my family is separate from my friends are separate from my colleagues. When I die, I expect it to take a few days or more before anyone notices. Then neighbors and immediate family will be aware, followed eventually by work and then my colleagues. My friends (who are all out of state) will probably never know. I worried about it for like five minutes, once, but then realized that by the time it mattered, I would be dead, so why would I care at that point.
rpupkin 13y ago
OP = attention whore
badusername 13y ago
I think it is quite insensitive, the way that post has been written. Scattered with so many private messages and needless investigative fluff. I do think it brought to discussion an important topic, but I'm not sure I appreciate the way it did.
tuananh 13y ago
simplest friend test: remove your bday on facebook and count how many wishes you get on your next bday ; ) You don't have that many "friends" as you think you do.
- nyrina 13y ago
  I have a bunch of, what I would describe as, friends, but I know none of their birthdays. Does that mean I don't have a single friend?
- corobo 13y ago
  You do have to make sure to tell people at some point when your birthday is. Even the bestest of best friends can't read minds :)
brubaker 13y ago
You might reconsider your definition of "friends" if it takes months and upwards of a year to communicate. Those are people you once knew, and barely know now.
NovemberWest 13y ago
I tend to hate stuff like this. He closes with suggesting life is fleeting and you should keep up to date with still living friends. There is no indication he is actually doing that. People routinely have wonderful things to say about the dead, often when they said (and did) terrible things to them while alive. Maybe he isn't a hypocrite but I have seen this too often from people who are.
chmike 13y ago
Damned impressive and I can imagine how chocking it can be. In old times we had necrology announcements in newspaper. Family would publish an announcement and people would read the necrology. The locality property of the information would make it some how work. But today with the so powerful communication means we have, there is no excuse that people can't be informed of such major events. It looks like there is a missing Internet service there. I don't think this should be charged, so I don't expect the opportunity for a big business there and a so called startup. But there there is definitely a need there and Internet solidarity or ISPs service should probably be the way to go to offer such type of service. Probably country administrations could be involved as well because we want to be sure there won't be fake death announcements.
bbejeck 13y ago
Great article same thing happened to me. I had an old friend that kept popping up in my mind and we briefly touched base to get together for a beer. I dropped the ball, and a couple of years went by, now he's gone for good.
bandy 13y ago
Katie Hafner wrote a book about online death about a decade ago: http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Seminal-Online-Community/dp/0786708468 http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Seminal-Online-Community/dp/0... It was triggered by the sudden death of one of the Well's prominent/prolific members, Blair Newman, which resulted in a lot of conversation about what happens to one's digital presence after death. In Blair's case, he had removed his content from the system and closed his account (as there were those who were bullying him) before his death. It was decided to restore the content (from backups) into a Memorial sub-conference for him not long after his death.
dclowd9901 13y ago
Says the guy who spends his effort and brilliance creating a site for entrepreneurs to meet. When I say things like, "Silicon Valley is a gigantic, worthless circle jerk," articles like this bring it starkly to light. I'm sure this guy feels many things about the death of his colleague, but I doubt he understands the irony of how it conflicts with the waste of his own life on efforts like his startup.
tyang 13y ago
Good post, Alex.

360 points by alexcaps 13y ago

Sucks. I had a friend/mentor pass and not find out for two years as well. I went to his blog, and was wondering why he never finished his house remodeling project... Found his wifes blog and found out about his year long fight with cancer. Life is precious.

mathattack 13y ago
Indeed. When my 10 year high school reunion came, we were surprised by several "Who knew?" instances of people passing away. It was always people 2 removed. With social media the amount of people 1 removed is closer, and it's easier to contact folks, but it's still a surprise to hear about young folks in that "see every year or so category" go. It's a shame when it's cancer.

jyz 13y ago

Wow. This almost makes me want to reactivate my facebook. Powerful post, bravo!

buro9 13y ago
Strange, it makes me feel glad I actually phone my friends.
- GFischer 13y ago
  Yeah, Facebook "friendships" are not the same (though it's handy for keeping up to date with people :) ). I at least have learned to post a "curated" version of my life online (after I was shown it wasn't good to share everything, even though I do tend to be quite open by default), and I assume many do the same, so you're not learning what's really happening with peoples' lives.
harrygold 13y ago
I de-activated my Facebook account a long while ago. going to reactivate to see who's still there and reach out to them with phone calls and emails. :( thanks for the reminder. Real Life.

snoonan 13y ago

Too true and common. A friend of mine in sales taught me to make sure you reach out to everyone who matters to you in some fashion on a regular schedule. To put it on your calendar. I never gave it much thought outside business, but it's something I'm going to start doing.

weeksie 13y ago

I come from a fishing town in Alaska and a year or so ago all of the people from my hometown started to show up on Facebook. I had been away for a very long time, lived all over the world, and only just started to get back in touch with my roots. Fishing is dangerous work. Over the last year I slowly learned how many people had died. I learned about more when I finally went back up to visit. The fisherman's memorial was a tough thing to walk by. It was even tougher to hear that people I had loved had died one, two, five years earlier and I had no idea. Life is short. Maintain those friendships.

clarky07 13y ago

I haven't had this happen, but something similar. One of my friend's dad passed away while I was away for college. This was before Facebook and since we went to different schools I didn't end up finding out for 6 months or a year.

noonespecial 13y ago

As one of the older folks on HN, I can tell you that death in the age of facebook is strange in that even when they are gone there's still a "there-ness" to them thanks to left over accounts. Its almost like at any moment, a tweet will pop up or an update to a wall... Perhaps that's the 21st century version of seeing ghosts.

stmchn 13y ago
It's very unsettling. I'm still in college but I've had a couple friends who have passed. I just don't have the heart to unfriend their accounts. Once in a while, I'll be browsing Facebook and their account will pop up. Some other friend will comment on their page or something like that, and for a brief instant, you think they're still alive somehow (which makes no sense of course) before you realize it's just someone interacting with their page.
LanceH 13y ago
And the post-death messages that they like Ikea, or Chipotle, which are spooky, weird and tacky, all at once.
- stmchn 13y ago
  It really gives "famous last words" a whole new meaning since all your tweets and Facebook statuses are forever immortalized. It makes me wonder what seemingly mundane thing will be the last thing people see from me on social media and will in turn be the first thing people see on my page when they find out I'm dead. It reminds me of Cory Monteith's (from Glee) recent passing. His last tweets were, "what the crap is Sharknado" "oh. IT'S A SHARK TORNADO." Just seems so odd to be remembered that way.
  - Nicholas_C 13y ago
    Very. Before my best friend passed, that morning his final tweet was "Everybody wants to go to Heaven, but nobody wants to die." He died in a drunk driving accident in which he was the passenger several hours later that afternoon.

garbagewatch 13y ago

Why in holy hell is this on hackernews?

stmchn 13y ago

This happened with the first friend I ever made taking my CS degree. We were in a lot of classes together and corresponded on a semi-regular basis on Facebook over school breaks and things. I had talked to him a couple months prior to this school year starting, but once I got back and noticed he wasn't in any of the classes we were supposed to have together, a mutual friend of ours informed me that he had committed suicide over the summer. It was so jarring that just a few months had passed and he was gone. I looked back on our Facebook messages. I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. The last thing he had sent me was some funny cat gif and I hadn't responded. I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> I had no idea he was in any sort of distress. > I know it's silly but I wish I had replied, thinking that it would have made a difference somehow. In case you're still harboring any sense of guilt over this, please don't. You are not responsible for your friend's death. This is a common reaction when a friend or acquaintance commits suicide; it's normal, but don't let it get the better of you.
verisimilidude 13y ago
I'm familiar with this feeling. It was around Christmas 2009, back in my middle-of-nowhere hometown. We got the old high school posse back together for the first time in 7 or 8 years. Everyone was doing pretty well on their own terms, from my one friend running his repair shop, to my other friend finishing up at an elite law school, to my own international adventures. All of us, except one. Despite getting an MBA, this dude was totally stuck in a rut, unemployed and somehow marooned back in our shitty hometown. I already had plans to return later in January and told him I'd give him a call. By the middle of January, he was gone. I've always wondered if my failure to set up plans to meet with him contributed to his depression and ultimate demise—if there's anything I could've noticed or done to stop it. Probably not, because he had lots of other problems. But I think the thought is always going to follow me.

fusiongyro 13y ago

I deleted and recreated my Google account recently. Some deceased friends of mine have "added me". An unsettling feeling.

AznHisoka 13y ago

I've had this happen to in the past. I may be cynical but I think most people just don't care enough about cultivating friendships with you, especially post-college. We just become too preoccupied with our jobs, family, obligations, etc. Even when we do have time to connect, we rather just sit in the couch and watch Breaking Bad instead.. too much effort. So yes, OP's thoughts are nice, but in the end, most of us just fall back to old habits.

Afforess 13y ago

This is why setting up a deathswitch with a trusted friend to manage your online accounts upon death is critical. Wills are nice and all but I don't trust my close family to be proficient enough to correctly close out my online accounts.

fourspace 13y ago
Any suggestions on how to actually do this?
- Fuzzwah 13y ago
  http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-digital-afterlife-with.html http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2013/04/plan-your-dig...
- Afforess 13y ago
  There are several services of varying levels of service, but honestly it's not that hard to write up a small script to fire off an email to get you to turn off the switch for a month. After multiple failures it assumes you are dead and sends a payload email to a trusted friend. You can easily prepay up a good sum on most hosts, aws, digital ocean, etc. plenty of good low-cost mail apis too, like mailgun.
- StavrosK 13y ago
  http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ http://www.deadmansswitch.net/ is what I wrote years ago to do it. Make sure your messages don't scare people too much, in case you forget to check in/don't get the emails, though.
  - jacquesm 13y ago
    One thing that always kept me awake about this idea is the fear of false triggering.
    - StavrosK 13y ago

goshx 13y ago

This reminds me of what I saw a couple weeks ago on Facebook. I saw a friend's birthday popping up on FB. Then messages to that friend sending wishes of happy birthday and good health, peace, and everything else people wish you on your bday, started popping up on my timeline. The problem was: she died two months ago. I didn't know exactly how to feel about that... The funny thing is that this happened in a small town (13k people), where everybody knows each other. That's when I decided to remove my birth date from FB. That is about the only time most of your "friends" will remember that you (may still) exist.

CodeCube 13y ago
I'm fine with acquaintances that don't really correspond with me when my birthday rolls around. However I explicitly don't wish anyone a happy birthday over facebook. If it's someone that's important to me, I will make it a point to either text them, call them, or otherwise arrange to meet up with them in person. Otherwise, I leave it unsaid.

United857 13y ago

Sadly, this is a byproduct of a passivity in relationships that seems to be more pervasive in the Facebook era. You don't need to reach out to your friends anymore, instead, we just consume each other's broadcasts.

wmeredith 13y ago
This was my first thought. If someone dies and you don't know until two years later, they weren't actually your friend. Or maybe, Facebook just has their buttons labeled incorrectly.
- IvyMike 13y ago
  Surely there are people between "Friends whose lives you are involved with on a day-to-day basis" and "Acquaintances that mean nothing to you". Friendship doesn't need to be a black-and-white concept; there are close friends and there are distant friends.
  - wmeredith 13y ago
    I agree. Now change the tile of this article to, "A distant friend died two years ago and I didn't know about it." And no one clicks.
    - yayadarsh 13y ago
      I don't see the point of this. Isn't distant friend a subset of "friend" as a group? This seems unnecessarily cynical about the title of this post.
    - Osmium 13y ago
      There's emotional distance and there's physical distance. I have been very close to people who are now very far from me. The fact that we don't get to speak often these days says nothing about the quality of the bond. Still very sad...
  - lostlogin 13y ago

mangeletti 13y ago

That was a really good article, and really sad. This happened to me recently, as well. I hadn't spoke with my best friend from Junior high in years (since I was 18), and I looked him up this past winter... died in Iraq (in 2006!), in an attack on his convoy. The reports were mixed. He either died by gun fire while defending the convoy after the initial attack, which was a road-side bomb, or he died as a result of the road-side bomb. It was the weirdest feeling, because I was sure I could have him on the phone in less than 1 day, and we'd be reminiscing about all the fun times we had back in the day, etc., and have some sort of "let's do that sometime soon" plans before the call was over. I was wrong. What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days... I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> I was a terrible friend. He was killed while fighting for our country (whether our imperialism is justified or not, our soldiers are important to our country's sovereignty), and I was busy vacationing in the Florida Keys. This happens to the best of us. In itself, it does not make you a terrible friend. > What's more, he had a wife and kid, which I never met. If I'd been a better friend, his wife would have had another person to comfort her with anecdotes of his younger days. You never know - she may be happy to hear from you regardless.

ffrryuu 13y ago

Be proactive about your health. lef.org is a great resource even if they are selling stuff to you...

Aldo_MX 13y ago

I always thought to write instructions about how to delete everything I have on the Internet and ask a relative to share that written instructions to a friend. Now I'm unsure if I want this to happen...

djhworld 13y ago

Man that last paragraph sent shudders down my back

racl101 13y ago

Dayum. That was weird story man. My condolences. Makes you wonder why your friend didn't reach out in his final days.

shanselman 13y ago

I have a friend who died a year ago and I still keep her in my Gchat. I don't want to remove her.

stretchwithme 13y ago
I have a friend that died 11 years ago and still have him in my address book and have a birthday reminder for him too.
elehack 13y ago
My Ph.D adviser (who was also a close colleague, mentor, and friend, very much not Ph.D's Prof. Smith) died this summer. One of the most acute grief triggers early on was seeing him in my chat roster (and shared Google Docs, calendar events, etc.).

TheSwordsman 13y ago

I had the same thing happen with a friend of mine who had moved. Her and I kept in touch periodically, and we'd always catch up and complain about the dumb shit going on in our lives. I hadn't heard from her in awhile, and her not responding back via text messages was always weird. I then checked out her facebook and saw all of the wall posts and lost my shit. What I wouldn't give to just have five more minutes to complain about the dumb shit one final time. Now and again, I see stuff related to her show up on facebook and I just kind of stop and think for a bit.

personlurking 13y ago

My mother passed just after I graduated from high school in the late 90s and although it was pre-FB (et al) and she wouldn't have been into social networks, I do wish there was something that recorded who she was...her moving about, her voice, something. A bunch of her friends ransacked her house for her things, which I was told they (my mother and them) had previously agreed upon in the case of her death, and so when I got there, there was almost nothing left of her things. I can't remember her voice anymore so, in that sense, having a FB profile of hers wouldn't do it for me but a Youtube video would. That would be nice.

chimeracoder 13y ago
> I can't remember her voice anymore This has to be the saddest thing I've read in this whole thread.
kelnos 13y ago
I'm in a similar boat. My mom passed away in 2001, and I have very few digital reminders of her (mainly just a few emails, but she never really got into the whole internet thing). She wasn't one to be photographed often, and even if she had been, I didn't get my first digital camera until a year or so after her death. I'm trying right now to recall her voice, and I'm having a lot of trouble doing so clearly. As much as a posthumous online presence could be unsettling, I really wish I had more tangible things to remind me of her.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

And on the other side of weird, I got a request from a person to introduce them to someone in my LinkedIn contacts list that I knew had passed. I passed along the information so they could be informed but realized that no doubt this person was getting emails from recruiters and such. Got the image of someone laying dead in their casket with their phone humming incoming calls/texts. I have stated in my will that my executor will put an indication about my demise on any social media accounts that folks might visit. And I included a signed letter authorizing said social media outlets to allow them to do so in my absence. Strange thing to have to include but it is the new world.

kabdib 13y ago

I lost a friend about a year and a half ago. He just stopped responding to email, and I found out he had died about two months after. Pancreatic cancer is a bitch -- he was gone in about three months, and he was (a) busy as fuck wrapping stuff up and (b) very sick for much of that period. He had all he could handle. I did get to go to a memorial for him a few months later. I still miss him; one of the best programmers I know, and he got me into motorcyling 25 years ago.

zimmru 13y ago

When my sister died it was a source of comfort to read her FB wall and see the nice things people wrote about her. I would think someone would have written on the OP's friend's wall that would give a clue that he had died. The other thing that's been nice is that we were able to find my sister's FB password, and were able to post her obituary. We continue to post pictures of her two young daughters she left behind.

Timothee 13y ago

Of course, this has happened for as long as people have been able to travel. Before the Internet, you'd move to a different city, and maybe you'd keep in touch with some people but for the most part, you'd never know what happened to most people you knew. Because as soon as they moved or changed their phone number, getting back in touch was limited or involved a certain amount of research. The difference now is that people who are in the acquaintance-Internet friend spectrum can still be reached easily with an email, a tweet, an instant message… if you wanted to. So they always feel kind of "there" even if you don't actually communicate with them. Until, like the author, you try to reach out and they don't reply back. It's kind of an interesting thing of online "friends": you can be in touch with somebody in a chat room or a forum for years and feel like you know them well (at least in the context, you've known them), but they can just disappear one day and you won't know if it's because they died or just moved on to other things. I was thinking about that about a guy I've been playing Words with Friends for probably three years. I only play with him because I know we're about the same level and it's hard to find players like that. (we were matched randomly) But I don't know anything about him except for his first name, most likely his birth year (based on his username) and possibly the fact that he lives on the East Coast based on the time he plays his turns. If he were to stop playing, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference from him being dead. It's a strange thing.

Sam121 13y ago

Some time we involve in busy life and forget to meet our lover one, No day's Messaging,email,chat,FB decide our relationship. Why not we understand they are just source of contact not interaction.

DanBC 13y ago

A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily". The online stuff is a bit hard for me to deal with. She had a friendster page, but not Facebook. There's a memorial, and some other snippets floating around. There's a glimpse of her in a Moloko video, and another (shorter) glimpse in the video of the Smith's last concert. I get no comfort at all from that memorial page, and it left me pretty much anti the idea of them. There's quite a lot of misinformation about her life, and her death, but she's dead and people close to her were grieving so I just ignored it and kept quiet. But it makes reading that stuff very hard. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhjiMx9SpnI) (http://www.a-free-guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1 http://www.a-free-guestbook.com/gb/6tsinfo/1) (http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all-dayer-happening-this-saturday-r1570 http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/event-news/va-va-voom-all-day...) (http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn-davis-r478 http://www.soul-source.co.uk/_/soul-news/sad-news-lynn-davis...)

chimeracoder 13y ago
> A very close friend died. I knew she died, she died while she was on the phone to me. I had my cell phone (to her) in one hand and my landline (to the police) in the other. They were saying "ask her about landmarks! Ask her for her address!" and she was saying "oh ho ho! You won't get it out of me that easily". As someone who has been in the same situation (though in my case my friend survived), I am very sorry for your loss. I still have nightmares sometimes about that experience - hearing the authorities bark orders into the phone on one end, hearing her scream at me, calling me a "traitor" when she realized I'd divulged her plans that she told me in confidence[0]. I even remember the exact song that I had been playing in the background (to give background noise, so she wouldn't realize I was on the other line) - I haven't been able to listen to it since. Back to the topic, though: I'm in the opposite situation. This former friend and I haven't spoken in many years (for unrelated reasons), and it would cause a lot of problems in our social networks if we reconnected. Still, every now and then (perhaps once a year or so), I am reminded of her and have the inclination to check in on her. We're not Facebook friends, but thanks to Twitter, her public blog, etc., it's easy for me to see that she's alive and well[1]. I'm not sure how I would react if I checked one day and found that she had passed on, whether by taking her own life[2], or from "natural" reasons. It would certainly be very difficult emotionally to handle seeing remnants of her life all across the Internet, almost all of which have been generated after the last time we spoke in person. [0] I pride myself on my integrity in general, but I don't regret my actions here. (She apologized later, for what it's worth). [1] for some definition of "well". [2] given the aforementioned history, there is a non-zero chance of this

BigChiefSmokem 13y ago

My aunt died last year and for a while I was getting requests from Zynga on fb that she was inviting me to play games with her. A lot like this thread, it hit me right in the feels :(

EmmaWatson 13y ago

sejje 13y ago

I had a friend die and I didn't find out for about 400 days. I was very upset, though I only knew this man via the internet...but we had been close friends for nearly a decade before having a falling out. He had cystic fibrosis and went from perfectly healthy to dead in about four days. His father and friends have taken up his various online presences--facebook, website, twitter. It's a neat little community that formed around him, even in his absence.

eyeareque 13y ago

This is why Facebook/Social networks cannot replace real life interactions. Maybe they weren't as close of a friend as you thought? If you don't hear from someone for two years and never make a phone call to reach out/or spend them with them, it sounds like they were more of an acquaintance than a real friend. I quit facebook back in April, and I can say that my friendships with true friends have been getting stronger ever since. passive relationships are not genuine.

gohrt 13y ago
This is such a shortsighted and cruel thing to say.
- mildtrepidation 13y ago
  That's one way to look at it. Another is that, perhaps, Facebook's redefinition of the term "friend" has taken some of the meaning out of it. This leaves us in an emotionally precarious position: I've called someone a friend, and perhaps even interacted with them more than I would've otherwise, thanks to this online facilitation. Does that make it more or less important? Does the difference matter? I don't think these are trivial questions. My opinion is that, no, someone you talk to infrequently on Facebook is not your "friend" in the same way as someone you see and interact with regularly outside of the webbynets. But I do think that point of view, if it isn't already, will soon be outdated. For better or worse, our online interactions are more numerous and significant. Perhaps it's time we consider that possibility and start re-evaluating our assumptions regarding friendship, what it entails, and what it requires.
- MrZongle2 13y ago
  How so? I think eyeareque is correct. In the days before the Internet, there were generally three ways to stay in touch with distant friends: writing letters, making telephone calls, or visiting in person. All three required varying degrees of time and effort on ones part, but this was offset by the simple pleasure of conversing with a friend. People didn't bother engaging in this sort of activity with acquaintances or "rather pleasant kinda-friends", because the personal connection didn't exist. There was no "payoff" significant enough to offset the effort. The likes of Facebook remove most of this time and effort requirement. You can "friend" people you haven't spoken to in years or even decades with a minimum of difficulty. While I'm sure there are plenty of cases where the lack of communication could be due to external causes (divorce, reassignment, death, job loss, etc) there are undoubtedly many more cases where people simply "drifted apart" because they found they didn't have strong common interests. Many Facebook (and similar social media) relationships really aren't "genuine" (as eyeareque stated) for this reason. Neither party really is interested in putting additional effort into the relationship beyond a simple "like" button click every now and then, if even that. The OP's story is sad, and while I agree with their summary that we should treasure our friends and family while we have them, let's not pretend that the Golden Age of Social Media has somehow provided us with a revolutionary relationship tool. Facebook is a dynamic, 21st Century version of the old "phone number and address book": full of people to whom you might send a Christmas card, but little else.

rbanffy 13y ago

Years ago, when Facebook was new and Orkut was taking its first steps, I decided to, once more, look up a good friend of my early computing career. He was one of my first BBS-friends, helped me set-up my first PC compatible, lent me an external hard-drive and taught me a lot about programming. By the time I finally found him, I realized he died six months before. We take our friends for granted. They are not.

skdjf 13y ago

Really scared of this one ... http://xkcd.com/686/ http://xkcd.com/686/

mildtrepidation 13y ago

Having lost -- I think? -- a friend whom I had before the advent of "friend me on FB," I can tell you there are more ambiguous, stranger ways to lose a friend, and they involve not finding out. I don't actually know he's dead. I only know that none of our mutual friends have heard from him, and that he was fighting with almost-certainly-terminal cancer to begin with. The supremely interconnected world of social media has certainly created problems. But there are other circumstances that people don't understand as well, situated some time between "all we have is the postal service" and "all we had was email" that don't even give you the closure of an obviously-defunct Facebook account or the direct reassurance of other friends/relatives. Many people here might not realize that before this sort of issue there was an entirely different one, and it ends with... well, it doesn't end. Which is really the problem.

cubsink 13y ago

One of my best friends committed suicide and I didn't know it for like a month or two. Got called up by another friend that told me. Even if me and another friend were his best pals, we weren't even invited to the funeral but went anyway. He still have a facebook account and a memorial page. I however managed to go around the problem by deleting my facebook account. Not for that reason though.

PaulHoule 13y ago

I've had people worry if I was dead when I stopped writing to certain social media accounts.

ahoyhere 13y ago

Surely I'm not the only one who read the screenshotted exchanges and thought: He just told the OP he's waiting for "answers" from the doctor. He can't make travel plans. He says it's long, gruesome, UGH. Guys. In case you have the social instinct of a cockroach, this is what they call A SIGN. Not a subtle one, either. That is when you LEAP to care for your friend. Here's what you do. You ask: Wait a minute, forget about whatever it is I wanted to talk about -- what's wrong? Are you okay? Do you want to talk? Why don't I come visit you instead of expecting you to travel? Alas, the author just glossed forward with "Well if you decide you can make it, let me know!" The sick (now dead) friend expressed well wishes for health to the OP, only to receive what kind of well wishes in return? None. Not even "good luck with your doctor's visit that I don't want to ask about cuz I'm not comfortable expressing feelings." How self-centered do you have to be to not even wish a friend with obvious health problems "good luck" or "feel better"? > "Now you’re probably thinking I’m a real shitty friend." Yes, but not because you didn't know he died. But because you didn't care enough to notice or ask while he was alive.

knice 13y ago
This was my thought too. The OP's friend seemed to be responding to each communication with leading statements and not once does it elicit a "tell me more" or "Oh goodness Mike, what's wrong? Is there anything I can do?"
sage_joch 13y ago
It seems wrong to say both that he has the "social instinct of a cockroach" and that he's selfish (implying his oversight was a choice). I'm inclined to believe it's the former, given that he is making a post like this. Social instinct is not easy for many programmers, myself included. Your comment almost amounts to assigning blame via the butterfly effect. edit: rewording my first sentence per comment below
- awj 13y ago
  > You can't simultaneously say that he has the "social instinct of a cockroach" and that he's selfish. I'm pretty sure you don't need social skills to be self-centered.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

I've long thought that somebody should write an app called "recycle me" for folks, like me, that post a lot on social media. It could just run your posts again in a loop, much like TV does reruns. If you had ten years or more of posts, it might even accomplish something like a poor man's immortality: you'd always be interacting with people, even people that weren't alive when you died. One can even imagine this being two-way: taking this to the next level by analyzing your online conversations and extrapolating what sorts of votes and comments you might make on new posts.

tjr 13y ago
After playing with CleverBot for a while a few years ago, some colleagues and I created a clone that we chatted with, training it for months. Chatting with it now is a lot like chatting with one of us. Granted, it doesn't always make sense, but the style of responses comes through.
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  For people who post online heavily, I don't think this is as far away as some might believe. Sure, it's not going to convince folks you're still alive, but it might provide entertainment to the great-great-great grandkids, let them know what you were like.
  - socksy 13y ago
    This idea (taken to its extreme) is the premise for a Black Mirror episode: http://vimeo.com/61215171 http://vimeo.com/61215171

meerab 13y ago

One of my coworker died of heart-attach two weeks ago. He had accepted meeting requests few hours before dying and had conversation with fellow co-workers. We couldn't believe that he is no longer alive. His name is still displayed on my frequently chatted contact list. The thought of pining him or e-mailing him has crossed my mind so many times..

alexcaps 13y ago

It means a lot to see everyone's comments and thoughts. Thank you. - OP

Sukotto 13y ago

Around The Corner Around the corner I have a friend, In this great city that has no end, Yet the days go by and weeks rush on, And before I know it, a year is gone. And I never see my old friends face, For life is a swift and terrible race, He knows I like him just as well, As in the days when I rang his bell. And he rang mine but we were younger then, And now we are busy, tired men. Tired of playing a foolish game, Tired of trying to make a name. "Tomorrow" I say! "I will call on Jim Just to show that I'm thinking of him", But tomorrow comes and tomorrow goes, And distance between us grows and grows. Around the corner, yet miles away, "Here's a telegram sir," "Jim died today." And that's what we get and deserve in the end. Around the corner, a vanished friend. -- Charles Hanson Towne I've had this happen to me. And it really hurts. Partly from the reality of death, and partly because it's so easy to play the what if game. What if I'd called any of the many times I thought about doing so? How would things have been different? As far as I know, there are no do-overs. So make a point of keeping in touch with the people you care about.

memsom 13y ago

When I was in my early 20's I had an intense email friendship with a girl I met in alt.music.nirvana. Her name was Michaels, and if you search hard enough, you can still find her Usenet posts on Google Groups. We lived on opposite sides of the world, but we kept in touch for over 2 or so years. Then she moved out of home, had no internet access and we list touch. One of the worst days of my life was the 10th anniversary of Kurt Cobain's death. Not because it was the day he passed on, but because of what I found. I tried to look her up. I felt she must have found the internet again. It had been some years since my last search. Sadly I discovered that I was never going to get a chance to speak with her ever again, because she had died in 2001, 3 years earlier. I managed to speak to her family, and her father told me that he had often wondered what had become of me. It's still hard to deal with. I have a reminder for her Birthday and the day she passed. It's a weird one really.

jroseattle 13y ago

This has happened to me a few times, now. Friends from high school and college passing away far too soon. At the time, I knew them well and we were very close. Of course, growing up and moving away and life progression takes you away from those you knew early in life to those late in life. My friends were all Facebook users, and I knew them before FB existed. We were connected through those services, but we didn't really communicate. They were wonderful people, all of them, and every time I learned of the news of their passing, it was through Facebook. My parents still read the newspaper, looking for the news about "who died". (They are also interested in the weather, but that's about it.) Nowadays, it seems social media is our generation's obit distribution system. In the end, I'm thankful for their images on Facebook. Even though we were no longer "daily" friends, I still miss them.

spiritplumber 13y ago

I wonder, what if I wrote a script to keep generating trivial updates to my various feeds in case I die, maybe by sentence mixing and so on. How long would it take for people to notice.

jbogp 13y ago

I have had a similar experience with a friend who died very young (probably suicide although I've never had confirmation). Anyway now every year a bunch of people still post something for his birthday some comments are followed by RIP others are not. I suspect some of these people still don't actually know he's dead and post a message directly through their newsfeed without looking at his profile. It's pretty awkward but it's not my place to go and tell them (I don't know most of them) "FYI, he's dead"

tobych 13y ago

Kinda had this happen. My ex-partner and close friend - "my rock" as I called her - Amanda "Moo" Hearn died a few years ago, just a few weeks after being diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I'd not called her for a couple of months. Kept meaning to. Then I suddenly had this urge to know how she was, and called, but the number had been disconnected, I think, so I called her sister who said "Oh, I'm so sorry Toby, Moo died yesterday." So yes, that Charles Hanson Towne poem (elsewhere on this thread) rings true for me. I email friends and call them occasionally and flippantly say "Hey, you're alive!" (I moved to the US six years ago and haven't been in touch quite like I used to be) and they don't realize I actually mean it. I hold a lot of guilt inside, dreading learning of another friend's death in a similar manner. Good to read this thread.

pstack 13y ago

I don't use social networks and my family is separate from my friends are separate from my colleagues. When I die, I expect it to take a few days or more before anyone notices. Then neighbors and immediate family will be aware, followed eventually by work and then my colleagues. My friends (who are all out of state) will probably never know. I worried about it for like five minutes, once, but then realized that by the time it mattered, I would be dead, so why would I care at that point.

rpupkin 13y ago

OP = attention whore

badusername 13y ago

I think it is quite insensitive, the way that post has been written. Scattered with so many private messages and needless investigative fluff. I do think it brought to discussion an important topic, but I'm not sure I appreciate the way it did.

tuananh 13y ago

simplest friend test: remove your bday on facebook and count how many wishes you get on your next bday ; ) You don't have that many "friends" as you think you do.

nyrina 13y ago
I have a bunch of, what I would describe as, friends, but I know none of their birthdays. Does that mean I don't have a single friend?
corobo 13y ago
You do have to make sure to tell people at some point when your birthday is. Even the bestest of best friends can't read minds :)

brubaker 13y ago

You might reconsider your definition of "friends" if it takes months and upwards of a year to communicate. Those are people you once knew, and barely know now.

NovemberWest 13y ago

I tend to hate stuff like this. He closes with suggesting life is fleeting and you should keep up to date with still living friends. There is no indication he is actually doing that. People routinely have wonderful things to say about the dead, often when they said (and did) terrible things to them while alive. Maybe he isn't a hypocrite but I have seen this too often from people who are.

chmike 13y ago

Damned impressive and I can imagine how chocking it can be. In old times we had necrology announcements in newspaper. Family would publish an announcement and people would read the necrology. The locality property of the information would make it some how work. But today with the so powerful communication means we have, there is no excuse that people can't be informed of such major events. It looks like there is a missing Internet service there. I don't think this should be charged, so I don't expect the opportunity for a big business there and a so called startup. But there there is definitely a need there and Internet solidarity or ISPs service should probably be the way to go to offer such type of service. Probably country administrations could be involved as well because we want to be sure there won't be fake death announcements.

bbejeck 13y ago

Great article same thing happened to me. I had an old friend that kept popping up in my mind and we briefly touched base to get together for a beer. I dropped the ball, and a couple of years went by, now he's gone for good.

bandy 13y ago

Katie Hafner wrote a book about online death about a decade ago: http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Seminal-Online-Community/dp/0786708468 http://www.amazon.com/The-Well-Seminal-Online-Community/dp/0... It was triggered by the sudden death of one of the Well's prominent/prolific members, Blair Newman, which resulted in a lot of conversation about what happens to one's digital presence after death. In Blair's case, he had removed his content from the system and closed his account (as there were those who were bullying him) before his death. It was decided to restore the content (from backups) into a Memorial sub-conference for him not long after his death.

dclowd9901 13y ago

Says the guy who spends his effort and brilliance creating a site for entrepreneurs to meet. When I say things like, "Silicon Valley is a gigantic, worthless circle jerk," articles like this bring it starkly to light. I'm sure this guy feels many things about the death of his colleague, but I doubt he understands the irony of how it conflicts with the waste of his own life on efforts like his startup.

tyang 13y ago

Good post, Alex.