NY Times: "Rituals of Grief Go Online"

Today's The New York Times has an article entitled, "Rituals of Grief Go Online as Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Lfe Recall Lives Lost." Click the title above for the link.

The experience of John Walker, the father of the late Deborah Walk, age 23, is similar to mine.

"It's a little weird to say as a parent, but the site has been a source for us to get to know her better," Mr. Walker said. "We didn't understand the breadth and scope of the network she had built as an individual, and we got to see that through MySpace. It helped us to understand the impact she's had on other people."

Although Avi did not keep a personal blog, Digital Pandemic served a similar networking function for him ... and now for me. I log on generally once a week. Some of Avi's online friends continue to memorialize him in their signature lines, and Digital Pandemic itself keeps a permanent, one-line tribute just underneath the copyright notice at the bottom of the page.

Fortunately, my family and I were largely spared the inappropriate messages of the kind received by Deborah's mother:

At the same time, Ms. Walker's mother, Julie, wrote in an e-mail message, the family was overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mail messages from strangers offering platitudes and seeking to advise them on how to handle their grief. The family found such offerings unwelcome, however well intentioned.

Mrs. Walker went on to write:

"The grief of our own friends and family is almost more than we can bear on top of our own, and we don't need anyone else's on our shoulders."

Probably because I was not overwhelmed with advice and platitudes, my reaction to the outpouring of online grief was just the opposite. Rather than feeling that the grief of others was weighing down on my shoulders, I felt that their grief carried me on their shoulders.

Incidentally, I did not have to lecture Avi about MySpace.com and the dangerous situations children were getting themselves into on it. Avi knew about the mistakes that his pers were making.