-
Source: ONE News -
Related
Erica Galbraith wakes before dawn. At 6am, she logs into Facebook to look at photos of her youngest son, Joshua.
He was eighteen when he died in a car crash in October last year.
Erica did not sign up for an account until after Joshua died. She will never be able to access his profile. Instead, every day she visits the tribute group created shortly after the accident.
Simply called Joshua Galbraith, the group has 487 members. They are friends, relatives, acquaintances and even strangers.
They upload pictures of Josh and post their favourite memories on the discussion board.
On the 30th of every month, the anniversary of his death, Erica writes on the group's wall: "I love you my darling. God help us survive without him."
The Facebook group has been a huge source of comfort for her. "In a way, it's private and yet it's not," she says.
"You say things you normally wouldn't say to people's faces...but I feel, on here, they don't mind me being sad."
The popularity of social networking sites like Facebook enables us to communicate with each other and share our lives at a level never seen before.
It's a logical progression that such sites can also be used to deal with death, from sharing the news, creating and joining tribute groups to posting messages on the wall of the deceased.
According to Canadian writer and cultural commentator, Hal Niedzviecki, we have moved into the age of "peep culture" - a digital phenomenon where privacy is a thing of the past and being a member of an online community is about seeing and being seen.
In this era, a social etiquette regarding the issue of grief and coping with death in a semi-public forum has yet to be established.
"There's an awkward blend of intimacy and detachment on Facebook that really comes to the forefront when a death occurs," Niedzviecki says.
"Nobody knows what's appropriate."
Emma Magro met Joshua when she started at St Paul's Grammar school, in Sydney's west, in Year Six. They bonded because they were both small for their age and remained friends through high school, often referring to each other as siblings. When they graduated in 2007, they drifted apart.
Magro would make attempts to contact Josh on Facebook and MSN but it was often weeks before he replied.
She did not find out about the accident until the morning after, when she was reading through her friends' status updates.
At first, she thought Josh must be sick. Then, she saw an update that said 'Rest in Peace.' She Googled the previous day's news to confirm it.
Soon, she was calling her boyfriend and begging him to come home from work. "I was in hysterics," she recalls.
She created the tribute group shortly afterward.
"I thought it would be nice for everyone to come together and remember," she says.
Magro pays homage to her friend on her own profile. She has altered the settings so that Josh will always appear in the box displaying a list of her friends, no matter how many times the page is refreshed.
She doesn't have a car and Josh's grave is too far away for her Blue Mountains home to visit. Instead, she posts messages on his Facebook wall.
She knows he will never reply, but it makes her feel like she can still talk to him.
Josh's wall is filled with messages. There are birthday, Christmas and New Year wishes, Valentine's day greetings and posts with only the words "I miss you."
"Life was seriously so much happier when you were around," the most recent message says.
Niedzviecki says that posting on a dead person's wall or joining a tribute group to express condolences is cathartic.
"In the end, posting to a Facebook page becomes more about us than 'them'," he says.
Counsellor Geoff Gannon believes that Facebook is a low pressure medium for people to express their genuine grief and commiserations.
"Mourning a death can be a taboo topic in our society. Writing on a group wall is the equivalent of sending flowers and a card."
Erica Galbraith will continue to check Josh's Facebook group every day. She is certain that without the site, not nearly as many people would have reached out to her or continued to do so nearly a year after her son's death.
"For me, this will never get any easier," she says. "But Josh is being remembered and that's a huge comfort."
