Ghost Story

I was scrolling through LinkedIn and I saw the automatic post about my brother's work anniversary. I had seen it last year too, two months after he died. It brings you up short. You're tooling along, thinking about other things, and then you're crying at the reminder of the loss. 

I expected their birthdays to be bad, and of course, the anniversaries of my mom's and brother's deaths. (Last year suuuuuuuuuucked.) But to have the internet just reach out and punch me in the chest on a random day in October is unfair. 

In 2009 or 2010, I found out on FaceBook that a high school classmate whom I barely remember, some friend of a friend, had killed himself, leaving his FaceBook page frozen in time. It was the first time I thought about the digital loose ends left behind. A decade later, a social media friend was dying of cancer, and he gave a friend his FB login info so that they could announce when he passed for all the far-flung people who cared about him. I heard that FaceBook implemented some feature to convert people's pages to memorials after they die. 

When G died suddenly, Lucy needed a couple of days before she could write and post the announcement of his death. I don't know if she converted his account, if he still had one, since I'm not on FaceBook any more. I kinda doubt they post death anniversary reminders, but maybe. Maybe that's a choice the survivors can make? 

I have abandoned social media accounts of my own. FaceBook, my original (The Social Media Platform Formerly Known as) Twitter account. I have others I've deleted completely. There might be people who wonder or care.

I feel like there's a novel, or at least a short story, in there somewhere about digital ghosts, but I need to go cry so maybe it will come to me later.