I had a new Facebook experience this week that I hadn’t experienced before, or ever even considered.  My Facebook friend Joe G. was not one of my best friends.  We had mutual friends from college and had only socialized together in person a few times.  But we knew enough of the same people that a few years ago Facebook recommended that he was someone I might know, and we “friended” each other.  By then, he had moved from Detroit to Seattle to work at Microsoft, so Facebook was the way a lot of his friends now kept in touch with him.

We both made regular posts on our home pages, or on our friend’s home pages, and we would comment to each other from time to time; mostly just typical Facebook banter.  It felt like we were keeping in touch, and maintaining a distant friendship, even though I don’t think that I actually spoke to him in years.  Two nights ago I heard from one of our mutual friends, through a Facebook message no less, that Joe had suddenly, and shockingly, passed away.

This is my first experience with the death of a “Facebook friend”, and the first time I have been notified of the death of someone I knew through social media.  Strangely or not, one of the first things I did after I read the message that he had died was to revisit my connection to him, and I went to his Facebook page.

Several people had already written kind words of tribute; about how he was smart, funny, and creative.  Most people expressed their astonishment and grief.   Someone had already posted a link to his obituary, and for the funeral arrangements.  As I kept scrolling down, I flinched as I got to his last post that he made a couple weeks ago.  It was jarring to see someone I knew that had just died writing in the first person.  As I kept scrolling down it was even more jarring to see my own comments I had made on his wall a few months ago.  (A quote from “The Princess Bride” that I barely remember even writing.)  But I kept clicking the “older posts” button and scrolling down, reading more and more of his comments and posts, almost reliving a record of our friendship from the past couple of years: I reread his remarks about local and national politics, re-watched videos he had posted from “The Daily Show” and other TV shows, and looked again at pictures of his condominium.  It was sad, kind of heartbreaking, and yet at the same time incredibly cathartic.

I checked today, and I read that Facebook will set a profile to “deceased” with proof of death and family consent.  I don’t know what will happen to his Facebook page, but I hope it is retained as a memorial to Joe.

Companies are spending billions of dollars trying to learn and measure how social media is changing the way we live our lives.  This is my first experience that social media will also change the way we deal with death.  Is this the way that we will now collectively come together to grieve and share memories of friends and loved ones?  It was definitely a different experience for me, and definitely got me thinking about Facebook in a whole new way.

Steve Iaquaniello is a Senior Statistician at Organic