HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
DARE DELLICAN’S INSTAGRAM
THE VIRTUAL CEMETERY
spread from Los Angeles to Miami. A few were in Brazil and Italy.
As with most people on Facebook,
they were former girlfriends and
dates-turned-friends, high school
and college classmates, co-workers.
Many hadn’t seen him in years.
Most didn’t know each other.
The message on Facebook,
linked to a newspaper article
about an unnamed man found
dead in a truck in the store’s
parking lot, is how nearly all
learned of Dowdell’s death.
Dowdell wasn’t close to his
mother and stepfather, and “we
knew from his family situation
that there would not be any sort
of memorial,” says Jessa Moore,
a 35-year-old friend who lives in
Jersey City, N.J. “Facebook became
our memorial. We could leave
messages for him and each other.”
Moore has been posting memories
of Dowdell on his page for four
months. Friends upload photos
of him and his dog, Bacon, and if
they are at a restaurant or bar he
would like, they “tag” his name so
his Facebook profile shows that
he, too, was there.
For some, it’s been a painful experience to see constant reminders of Dowdell online, as if he were
still living. Others have wondered
if they’re being respectful of his
privacy. But for Moore, it’s been
cathartic. “For a month, I was there
on his page every day. It just sort of
kept us all connected,” she says.
It used be that news of death
spread through phone calls, and
before that, letters and house
calls. The departed were publicly
remembered via memorials on
street corners, newspaper obituaries and flowers at grave sites. To
some degree, this is still the case.
But increasingly, the announcements and subsequent mourning
occur on social media. Facebook,
with 1 billion detailed, self-submitted user profiles, was created
to connect the living. But it has
become the world’s largest site of
memorials for the dead.
Dowdell
is seen in
an image
he took on
Instagram,
while
waiting
for a train.