HUFFINGTON
01.20.13
THE VIRTUAL CEMETERY
California-Irvine.
“But what’s known is that this
Facebook generation will have
more experiences with death than
any generation before it. Because
anyone you ever knew, people
who have naturally faded from
your life, will remain there and
you will stumble into them and
realize they are dead.”
That’s what happened with
Dowdell. Moore, a communications student and actress, had met
him six months before July 16.
ed a message on his Facebook
wall after speaking to Dowdell’s
mother, with whom Dowdell
had a strained relationship. He
would be cremated with no ceremony. So Moore and a handful of
Dowdell’s friends began exchanging messages, planning for a celebration to keep his memory alive.
They posted photos of him
ahead of the gathering: a dapper
Dowdell at a friend’s wedding,
him with a good friend’s dog, him
wearing a blue baseball cap and
“FACEBOOK BECAME OUR MEMORIAL.”
They first contacted each other on
OkCupid, a dating website. There
were no romantic sparks, but they
became friends.
“We texted or talked or Facebooked every day… He was supposed to come over for dinner
that week,” Moore says. But
Dowdell’s Facebook page, peppered with photos of him with
dogs, pictures of his design projects and videos of him dancing,
had been quieter than usual.
Moore didn’t come across the
post about what happened until
a few days later. A friend post-
posing with a friend, one that
captured his fun-loving spirit:
sticking his tongue out in a grainy
iPhone photo. On July 26, Dowdell
was posthumously tagged at his
own wake at Stout, a bar in Manhattan. “A gathering of the FAB
ladies in honor of our dear friend
Anthony (Dare). RIP, we love and
miss you ♥ ,” the friends wrote.
The page has been filled with
similar updates since. Most
times, the friends speak directly
to Dowdell, as if writing on a
Facebook wall will transmit a
message to him.
“It’s more for us than for him,”
says Moore, whose name is scattered throughout the page with her