Facebook- Part of the Grieving Process?

I currently have 2 friends on facebook that I know of who have died recently. Both of them are friends from my college years, and I was closer friends with one more than the other. I just found out about this one today, which I was very sad to hear about. The weird thing about finding out though, was that I was literally just thinking about him earlier today, and I had a sudden thought that I felt like he had died. He had a history of fighting cancer, and the last I heard from him, he was fighting it again. So I got on facebook to check things out, and as fate would have it, it was his birthday. So I clicked on his profile, and I found messages from people proclaiming how much they missed him and how saddened they are about his death. I'll admit I got a shiver up my spine on that one.

However, a thought occurred to me. We are in an era right now where networking sights are having to ask the question, "What happens when someone who has a profile on facebook dies?" Should their page be deleted? Moved to another part of the site that contains memorial pages? How to handle this? As I read through the stories that people told about this amazing young man, looked through his pictures, and read his quotes (some even about living our lives to the fullest because we never know how much time we have left on earth), I realized that a site such as facebook can be used for keeping that person alive in our lives (in a healthy way.) A facebook page can become a memorandum of someone's life, their stories that other people share, their pictures, their very memory- a step in the grieving and remembering process, and as my best friend pointed out, "it's like a guest book at a funeral," except it's an ongoing guest book where people can continually offer up stories and memories of that person and his/her life, see pictures, read stories, and remember the good times that were shared, and the struggles, too. I hope that sites such as facebook will eventually come to a conclusion about what to do in these situations, but I also hope that the solution is to keep a person's page as a way of keeping memories and stories alive.

There's my 2 cents!

I leave you with a quote from his profile:
"Someday we are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The number of people who could be here where I am right now outnumber the grains of sand in the Sahara. If you think about the number of events that that had to have happened for you and I to exist; we are quite grotesquely lucky to be here. We are privileged to be alive and we should make the most of our time in this world."
-Richard Dawkins

Jeff, you are missed.