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The Web of Grief

By Siri Agrell
National Post
November 29, 2005

On his Web site, two-year-old Gabriel Strom smiles in front of a backdrop of sunflowers and a cloud-dotted sky.

The site describes him as a charismatic and loving child, with a puppy named Sulley and a penchant for Shrek and The Little Mermaid.

Gabriel was born on July 19, 2000, in Lethbridge, Alta., and has been dead since 2002.

"After he died I just went around surfing the 'Net looking for different poems and things like that," said his mother, Christy Strom, who posted the memorial for Gabriel on a Web site called Parting Wishes (http://www.partingwishes.com). "There are a lot of people who have lost children; I just thought it might help someone else, too."

Mrs. Strom is one of countless bereaved individuals who have turned to the Internet in their time of grief, using it not only to plan a funeral or contact relatives, but to pay tribute to a life lost.

"It was just easy access for me doing it at home," Mrs. Strom said last week. "I still visit it when it comes around to the time of year that he died. Or if I'm ever feeling really down."

Parting Wishes was founded by Toronto business partners Tim Hewson and Henry Raud, originally conceived to help people plan their own wills and funeral services, as well as set up a personal Web site that would go online after they died.

"But then we found most people wanted to create a memorial for somebody else who had died," Mr. Hewson said.

There are now 5,897 memorials on the Parting Wishes site, commemorating the dead and serving as a meeting place for friends and families spread across the country or around the world.

It is one of hundreds of group and individual sites where people post pictures, biographies, stories and videos of the dead, adopting the Internet as a new arena in which to express and share their pain.

Pamela Roberts, who teaches a death and dying class at the University of California, Long Beach, has been studying the cyber cemeteries since 1995, when a tech-savvy student tipped her off to their existence.

"I'd never even been on the Web. I said, 'Show me these things,' " she recounted recently. "I've been tracking them since then."

Ms. Roberts is now writing a book on Web memorials with the working title Death on the Web: Private Ritual in Public Cyberspace, which chronicles the evolution of grief on the Internet and compares it to historical forms of bereavement.

"There's really no good comparison," she said. "Victorian times seem to be the closest, in terms of individuals being able to display their grief in public form."

Then, people would hand out mementoes of the dead at funeral services and create jewellery out of their hair.

"They had a lot more individual expression about their bereavement than we've had in any recent times," she said. "But there's been nothing like this where everyone who has access to a computer can write whatever they want about the deceased."

With her students, Ms. Roberts has studied the characteristics of hundreds of Web memorials culled from popular sites, and surveyed their creators to gauge demographic makeup and personal motivations.

She expected to find a community of "disenfranchised grievers," people who for whatever reason -- their sexual orientation or the nature of their loved one's death -- had not received adequate support in the community at large.

Instead, she found the keepers of cyber cemeteries to be as diverse as the World Wide population, and that they were memorializing men and women, young and old.

But when it comes to content, the on-line memorials are unlike any traditional outlet for loss.

"They don't look like obituaries at all," she said. "Most are just telling them how much they're missed, but in this very public forum."

Thirty percent of the sites Ms. Roberts studied were written as letters to the dead, notes that go on for lines or pages intended for a person no longer of this world.

At first, Ms. Roberts wondered if the authors knew that strangers could access their sites, but she soon recognized they understood the unusual makeup of their audience.

"This man whose wife had died, he's writing to her and he says, 'I miss you so much.' And then the next paragraph is: 'She died of cancer,'" Ms. Roberts said. "So he gives the story of her death to those who might not know, and then he goes back to talking to her."

The sites do not harp on demographic information -- the references to lineage, education and employment history so often found in newspaper obituaries and funeral programs.

Mr. Hewson believes Web memorials like those on Parting Wishes are popular because they allow people to say what they want, without worrying about being proper, modest or frugal.

"They want to say how special this person was. You can put an ad in the paper, but it's not the same," he said. "I don't think that really allows people to express their grief as well as a Web site."

Many on-line memorials focus on types of death and loss that are difficult to talk about in person.

Women who have miscarried or delivered stillborn babies can openly express their pain and disappointment and wonder aloud what might have been.

People who have lost a family member or friend to a traumatic incident can retrace the events of the car crash, murder or accident -- exercising a need well-documented in bereavement literature to tell the story over and over until it sinks in.

"You see that: pages and pages about exactly what happened, how someone died," Ms. Roberts said. "So what people do verbally, they're also doing on the Web."

Almost 85% of Ms. Roberts' subjects also said they visit their Web memorial with others, actually sitting down as a family in front of the computer

But the Internet allows the bereaved to access a community well beyond their kin.

Only about 1% of the people Ms. Roberts contacted in her study have actually physically met someone they contacted in a cyber cemetery, but almost all of them communicate back and forth through guest books that are standard on every site.

Ms. Roberts said the bereaved exist in a liminal state, stuck between their past, complete lives and whatever may come next.

"Having other people who have gone through it, especially if they've come out the other side, can be extremely helpful," she said.

One woman Ms. Roberts and her students studied would regularly visit her brother's Web memorial and then "go visit a few extras."

"We followed her around," said Ms. Roberts, who tracked the woman through the unusual e-mail address she left with each guest book signature. "She would say, 'I was here visiting my brother and I saw your memorial.' It's very much what people do when they visit a physical cemetery."

And just as some people build impressive shrines or ornate tombstones as the physical reminder of a life, so too do people pour their hearts and personalities into on-line memorials.

"One woman set up a site for her teenage son that had 20 buttons you could push," said Ms. Roberts. "You could go to his artwork and e-mail messages, her blog, his stepfather's statement, eulogies from his service, his school pictures."

Another woman linked to her son's final phone message, a sweet, young voice telling his mother that he would be late for dinner.

"Right now the big trend is to have cursive writing that glitters," said Ms. Roberts. "There are flying angels on every single one practically. That's something people like."

Creating an impressive Web memorial is a way of reminding yourself and others that an important life has been lost.

"When someone's dead, other people aren't going to meet them any more or know about them," said Ms. Roberts. "Here's this way of kind of prolonging that."

At PartingWishes.com, Mr. Hewson regularly receives e-mail from people who want the site they created displayed as a "featured memorial."

He and his partner employ the concept to showcase the program's potential, creating mock multimedia memorials for deceased characters or celebrities such as Dumbledore or Katharine Hepburn.

"People say, 'This is a great memorial -- put it on your home page.'" he said. "Nobody knows who this individual is but they want people to know."

For decades people have created physical tributes for the dead for others to see: plaques on park benches or a specially planted tree.

But those tributes do not explain who a person was, Mr. Hewson said.

"You walk past it and you say, 'I don't know who that person was, but nice tree.'" he said. "This allows you to really explain who that individual was to anybody in the world. I don't think there's any other forum for that."

Everyone who responded to Ms. Robert's study said building a Web memorial has helped them through their grief, and 20% volunteered -- unprompted -- that they found it so beneficial they suggested it to others.

The Internet is where people live much of their personal lives these days, said Ms. Roberts, and it provides the bereaved with one more place to revisit their loss, commune with the dead and share their feelings with the living.

"I don't think it's a different kind of grieving, it's a different kind of medium," she said. "We just have more access to it now."

© National Post 2005

(Note that you can create your Will, Power of Attorney and Living Will online at http://www.PartingWishes.com, http://www.USLegalWills.com, http://www.LegalWills.ca and http://www.LegalWills.co.uk).

For More Information Contact:

PartingWishes.com
Email: support@partingwishes.com
Internet: http://www.partingwishes.com