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

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

#51

Post by Osmium »

wmeredith wrote: post #40
IvyMike wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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...

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

#52

Post by ChuckMcM »

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.

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

#53

Post by [deleted] »

noonespecial wrote: post #8

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.

[deleted]

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

#54

Post by kalhank »

noonespecial wrote: post #8

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.

A client I worked for had his CISO pass away unexpectedly at a relatively young age due to a heart attack. My client then recounted how he received a LinkedIn update a few days following his death, and the first thing my client thought was "talk about remote access!"...he has an interesting sense of humor.

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

#55

Post by pbhjpbhj »

eddieroger wrote: post #34
noonespecial wrote: post #8

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.

You can actually have a Facebook "friend" marked as deceased (in quotes, because it's actually pretty stringent on how to make this happen, and you have to be family), which prevents them from showing up places like feeds and likes and search. I had to have my grandmother marked as deceased, and it was one of the most difficult parts of the posthumous clean up tasks.

There's a notification system where you can send a link to a newspaper obituary (as a FB Friend) and they apparently use that to memorialise the persons page.

A friend's page/wall is live it just says "lived" instead of "lives". I can't recall any spam related to his page since I notified FB so I think they must lock it down too.

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

#56

Post by kabdib »

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.

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

#57

Post by StavrosK »

jacquesm wrote: post #45
StavrosK wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One thing that always kept me awake about this idea is the fear of false triggering.

Yeah, there is a small risk, although, in all the years, it's been two instances where emails stopped going out and some people forgot to log in in that duration (nothing has ever gone out before its time).

You can customize your notification intervals to make them longer or more frequent, if you want. The risk isn't very big, though, especially if you remember to log in every first of the month, for example, just to make sure.

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

#58

Post by sliverstorm »

wmeredith wrote: post #28
United857 wrote: post #21

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.

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.

Maybe not your friend today, but how about your friend from yesteryear? I reach out periodically to old friends that I have absolutely no contact with (no Facebook, no nothing) just to see how they are doing and reminisce, and they do the same.

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

#59

Post by sliverstorm »

Afforess wrote: post #16

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.

That's really not what I took away from this. Why do you... you know, care what happens to your online accounts? Web accounts are no more special than your library or toll road accounts. The only reason bank accounts matter at all is because the contest need to be disbursed.

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

#60

Post by zimmru »

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.

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