I think I've written about this before, but last year I heard about the death of a guy I had been a few years ahead of in high school and so of course I checked out his page, only to find that it had become a shrine of sorts. All kinds of people had come out of the woodwork to post things that they likely would not have said to the guy's face (in a good way). I also noticed that people were creating a kind of (with all due respect) circlejerk of grief that stretched beyond what I think is a healthy grieving period. In fact, I think that having his page up probably made it harder to deal with his death in a similar way that breaking up with someone can be harder if you're friends on facebook. I do wonder what effect this kind of thing will have on people over time and no doubt there is some anthropologist looking into this at this very moment, but in a time of increasing digitization I wonder if in some ways it's becoming harder to die, or at least harder to pass out of the minds of the living.