Elizabeth Stone, “Grief in the Age of Facebook”
Instructor's Notes
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Elizabeth Stone
Grief in the Age of Facebook
Elizabeth Stone teaches English and media studies at Fordham University. Her critically acclaimed nonfiction work A Boy I Once Knew: What a Teacher Learned from Her Student was published in 2002. In 2004 she followed that book with Black Sheep and Kissing Cousins: How Our Family Stories Shape Us. In the following article, first published in the Chronicle Review on March 5, 2010, Stone recalls the death of one of her students and examines how that death was subsequently mourned on Facebook.
AS YOU READ: What questions does the author raise about this form of grieving?
1
On July 17 last year, one of my most promising students died. Her name was Casey Feldman, and she was crossing a street in a New Jersey resort town on her way to work when a van went barreling through a stop sign. Her death was a terrible loss for everyone who knew her. Smart and dogged,° whimsical and kind, Casey was the news editor of the Observer, the campus paper I advise, and she was going places. She was a finalist for a national college reporting award and had just been chosen for a prestigious television internship for the fall, a fact she conveyed to me in a midnight text message, entirely consistent with her all-news-all-the-time mind-set. Two days later her life ended.
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2
I found out about Casey’s death the old-fashioned way: in a phone conversation with Kelsey, the layout editor and Casey’s roommate. She’d left a neutral-sounding voice mail the night before, asking me to call her when I got her message, adding, “It’s OK if it’s late.” I didn’t retrieve the message till midnight, so I called the next morning, realizing only later what an extraordinary effort she had made to keep her voice calm. But my students almost never make phone calls if they can help it, so Kelsey’s message alone should have raised my antenna. She blogs, she tweets, she texts, and she pings. But voice mail? No.
3
Paradoxically it was Kelsey’s understanding of the viral nature of her generation’s communication preferences that sent her rushing to the phone, and not just to call boomers° like me. She didn’t want anyone to learn of Casey’s death through Facebook. It was summer, and their friends were scattered, but Kelsey knew that if even one of Casey’s 801 Facebook friends posted the news, it would immediately spread.
4
So as Kelsey and her roommates made calls through the night, they monitored Facebook. Within an hour of Casey’s death, the first mourner posted her respects on Casey’s Facebook wall, a post that any of Casey’s friends could have seen. By the next morning, Kelsey, in New Jersey, had reached the Observer’s editor in chief in Virginia, and by that evening, the two had reached fellow editors in California, Missouri, Massachusetts, Texas, and elsewhere—and somehow none of them already knew.
5
In the months that followed, I’ve seen how markedly technology has influenced the conventions of grieving among my students, offering them solace but also uncertainty. The day after Casey’s death, several editorial-board members changed their individual Facebook profile pictures. Where there had been photos of Brent, of Kelsey, of Kate, now there were photos of Casey and Brent, Casey and Kelsey, Casey and Kate.
6
Now that Casey was gone, she was virtually everywhere. I asked one of my students why she’d changed her profile photo. “It was spontaneous,” she said. “Once one person did it, we all joined in.” Another student, who had friends at Virginia Tech when, in 2007, a gunman killed 32 people, said that’s when she first saw the practice of posting Facebook profile photos of oneself with the person being mourned.
7
Within several days of Casey’s death, a Facebook group was created called “In Loving Memory of Casey Feldman,” which ran parallel to the wake and funeral planned by Casey’s family. Dozens wrote on that group’s wall, but Casey’s own wall was the more natural gathering place, where the comments were more colloquial and addressed to her: “casey im speechless for words right now,” wrote one friend. “I cant believe that just yest i txted you and now your gone . . . i miss you soo much rest in peace.”
8
Though we all live atomized° lives, memorial services let us know the dead with more dimension than we may have known them during their lifetimes. In the responses of her friends, I was struck by how much I hadn’t known about Casey—her equestrian skill, her love of animals, her interest in photography, her acting talent, her penchant° for creating her own slang (“Don’t be a cow”), and her curiosity—so intense that her friends affectionately called her a “stalker.”
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9
This new, uncharted form of grieving raises new questions. Traditional mourning is governed by conventions. But in the age of Facebook, with selfhood publicly represented via comments and uploaded photos, was it OK for her friends to display joy or exuberance online? Some weren’t sure. Six weeks after Casey’s death, one student who had posted a shot of herself with Casey wondered aloud when it was all right to post a different photo. Was there a right time? There were no conventions to help her. And would she be judged if she removed her mourning photo before most others did?
10
As it turns out, Facebook has a “memorializing” policy in regard to the pages of those who have died. That policy came into being in 2005, when a good friend and co-worker of Max Kelly, a Facebook employee, was killed in a bicycle accident. As Kelly wrote in a Facebook blog post last October, “The question soon came up: What do we do about his Facebook profile? We had never really thought about this before in such a personal way. How do you deal with an interaction with someone who is no longer able to log on? When someone leaves us, they don’t leave our memories or our social network. To reflect that reality, we created the idea of ‘memorialized’ profiles as a place where people can save and share their memories of those who’ve passed.”
11
Casey’s Facebook page is now memorialized. Her own postings and lists of interests have been removed, and the page is visible only to her Facebook friends. (I thank Kelsey Butler for making it possible for me to gain access to it.) Eight months after her death, her friends are still posting on her wall, not to “share the memories” but to write to her, acknowledging her absence but maintaining their ties to her—exactly the stance that contemporary grief theorists recommend. To me, that seems preferable to Freud’s prescription, in “Mourning and Melancholia,” that we should detach from the dead. Quite a few of Casey’s friends wished her a merry Christmas, and on the 17th of every month so far, the postings spike. Some share dreams they’ve had about her, or post a detail of interest. “I had juice box wine recently,” wrote one. “I thought of you the whole time :( Miss you girl!” From another: “i miss you. the new lady gaga cd came out, and if i had one wish in the world it would be that you could be singing (more like screaming) along with me in my passenger seat like old times.”
12
It was against the natural order for Casey to die at 21, and her death still reverberates° among her roommates and fellow editors. I was privileged to know Casey, and though I knew her deeply in certain ways, I wonder—I’m not sure, but I wonder—if I should have known her better. I do know, however, that she would have done a terrific trend piece on “Grief in the Age of Facebook.”
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Questions to Start You Thinking
Considering Meaning: Stone argues that, in the face of grief, technology gives people “solace but also uncertainty” (paragraph 5). How do Casey’s friends find consolation in Facebook? What kinds of uncertainty do they face?
Identifying Writing Strategies: Stone includes in her essay quotes from Casey’s Facebook page, written in lowercase with text-messaging abbreviations. How do these quotes convey the feeling of the memorialized Facebook page? What is the effect of the contrast between these casual bits of writing and Stone’s more formal essay?
Reading Critically: How does Stone show that her students and their friends have a different relationship to digital media than she does? How does her relative unfamiliarity with Facebook affect this discussion of how people use technology to mourn a loss?
Expanding Vocabulary: Stone observes that Casey’s friend Kelsey responded paradoxically (paragraph 3). What is a paradox? How do Kelsey’s phone calls to those who knew Casey fit the definition?
Making Connections: In “The New Literacy,” Clive Thompson mentions a study that found that students, in their online communications, “were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across” (paragraph 6). In what ways do the online memorials and tributes to Casey reflect this attention to audience? Do you think that Thompson would consider the memorials and tributes part of “the new literacy”? Why, or why not?
Link to the Paired Essay
Both “Grief in the Age of Facebook” and Libby Copeland’s “Is Facebook Making Us Sad?” pay particular attention to college students and the impact of social media on their emotional lives. What do you see as the nature and the extent of the generational divide between people who have grown up with Facebook and those for whom it is a new technology? In what ways does Facebook bridge or boost that divide?
Journal Prompts
As Stone points out, the creators of Facebook only realized after the fact that their site could become a place to mourn people (paragraph 10). Have you used Facebook to acknowledge a loss? If so, how? How else do you or your friends use Facebook in ways that the creators might not have anticipated? What do such uses say about digital media?
Stone’s essay brings up an old question about how we should deal with death: Should we cultivate an ongoing relationship with the loved one’s memory, as Casey’s friends do on Facebook, or should we, as Freud recommends, “detach” from people we have lost (paragraph 11)? Think about someone you have lost—either through death or other circumstances, like a move—and reflect on how you coped.
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Suggestions for Writing
At the end of “Grief in the Age of Facebook,” Stone imagines Casey writing a “trend piece” of the same title (paragraph 12). Write an essay considering Stone’s closing, why she ends on this note, how this conclusion affects you as a reader, or how Casey’s approach to this topic might differ from her professor’s.
Stone says that she learned new things about Casey by looking at her Facebook page (paragraph 8). Do you think that people can gain a deeper understanding of someone from his or her online presence? Write an essay that takes a stand, presenting your own position, supporting Stone’s point, or arguing that Facebook is not a good way to get to know someone. Use other technology examples, if you wish, as well as your own experience, observation, or research.