Late at night, after my family goes to bed, enveloped by the darkness I cannot sleep in, the little circle of light on the side of my laptop pulses invitingly, a beacon from a virtual world. I curl up on the couch and lift it’s lid. The battery warms my legs. I log onto my Facebook account. I know where I’m going and apprehension shakes me from my stomach to my fingers as the “wall” for the R.I.P Lena Loucks group loads on my browser.
Reading the condolences people have left when responding to funeral announcement turned out to be almost pleasant. Wrong word. Kind of relaxing….Predictable. When posting messages on the event page, people are aware they are speaking to the family and they choose their words accordingly.

The “wall” on the other hand… On the Facebook Wall posters are reaching out to each other, to Lena, to the universe and frequently exhibit the abandon of an apostate shaking his fist at the heavens. Words are optional, all digital media wielded as a weapon of expression. The results can be incredibly moving. And emotionally dangerous.
Hundreds of photos from Lena’s life are posted to the wall. Grade school, middle school, high school, college. Camp, vacations, road trips, parties. A girl whose name I don’t recognize is one of the most prolific photo posters. Later, I overhear Lena’s friends grumbling: most of the photos this girl had posted were taken from other people’s Facebook albums, mainly theirs. To me, this seems like a nice thing to do, but it is, apparently, a breach in Facebook etiquette. Once again, I find myself secretly pleased that, like the interlopers who joined the group and increased it’s number, someone was willing to risk the scorn of others to enhance my brag book. Besides, so many of those photos I might have never seen were it not for the girl whose name I didn’t recognize but now will always remember.

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We posted details for Lena’s funeral service as an “event” on R.I.P. Lena Loucks. Many of those who respond include a personal message. Like mourners filing by to greet the family, those who send their regrets write the words they would have said if they were with us. Outside the somber confines of a cemetery or chapel, the declarations of regret, grief and sympathy are…exuberant. Exclamation points. Rows and rows and rows of hearts. All caps. Lena’s friends who are away at college write to say they are with us in spirit. Their messages are so heartfelt I do believe I can feel their spirits surround me.

What a luxury to receive these condolences in my own space, my own time, without having to compose individual responses to the necessarily trite expressions of sympathy – how many ways are there to say what there are no words to say. It’s hard to stand there face to face and convey emotion with a pained look and a series of words that, after hundreds of years of use cannot sound fresh and sincere. And yet we want to hear them said and need the contact shared when the members of our tribe arrive to say them. Ripped open from such a terrible blow, we crave the communal gathering of the wood, building of the fire, purification of the wound. And isn’t it convenient, now we can get all that on Facebook. Well, perhaps not in the directly carbon producing sense (though I’m sure Lena, as an Environmental Science major could show me how Facebook produces as much carbon as a funeral pyre).

So here we mourners are, in the 21st Century, paging down line after line of posts from people beyond the physical reach of those of us gathering together. Our Facebook Friends log on to their accounts, wanting to come hunker down by the fire, the cradle of civilized grieving. The soft glow from their magic boxes a way to share the flames.