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When Parents Take Over Their Deceased Child's Facebook Page


methodwriter85

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I got the heebie jeebies the other day when I was playing the game Farmville yesterday, and I got a notification that B.P. had done something to help my farm.

 

B.P. died back around August, an apparent suicide. He was only 22. After that, his father took over the page, giving us updates on stuff like the funeral. Then he started sending us stories about Brian. Now he's apparently using his son's facebook page regularly enough that he's playing Farmville under the name of his dead son.

 

I understand the father is grieving, and maybe this is his way of dealing with it, but god, this just creeps me out so much. Am I wrong for feeling like there's something wrong about this? It'd be one thing if the father just left the page up as a memorial, but I've gotten a birthday notification, status updates, and now Farmville help from B.P., who died back during the summer, and it's really unsettling. I'm thinking about deleting him from my profile, but I don't know if that would be a nice thing to do. Still, I just feel really uncomfortable about this.

 

UPDATE: I wound up deleting the profile from my friends page in October. When it had reached over a year, I just couldn't take the weirdness of it anymore. It's not my friend Brian's page anymore- it's his dad's.

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Thats....strange.

 

Exactly. That's why I feel really unsettled by it. I don't want to slam on a guy for the way he's dealing with his grief, but Brian's father really should think about taking down the Facebook page, I think. Or just not posting on it. I mean, I really don't want to see notifications from the profile of a dead friend, I think.

 

Or I should think about deleting Brian as a friend. Which...I mean, I know he's dead, but that would feel like a mean thing to do to him.

 

Am I right for feeling like this is weird and being really uncomfortable with it? It feels like shades of how a parent will refuse to change anything about a dead child's room and leave it just as the child left it- neither that nor what Brian's father is doing feels all that healthy.

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I thought FB had procedures in how to deal with this. I had something similar with a friend 3 years ago. And I'm sure I read something about this recently. I thought they had a timelimit on how long they would leave it there. But goodluck with things.

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I don't think you have to feel guilty about defriending the profile. You are not defriending your deceased friend, you are defriending a FB profile that no longer has any link to him.

 

FB has a process called "memorializing" that basically locks the profile down so people that knew the owner could see it, but no one else can find it in a search, and it freezes it as a memorial, it can't be updated. Not sure how you could get FB to do this if you're not directly related to the deceased, though.

 

It's pretty creepy behavior, for sure.

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I am continually getting help in Farmville from Brian's father under Brian's profile. I am really close to deleting this profile. It is just too creepy that he's playing Facebook games under his dead son's profile.

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Whatever you do, the fact that you're feeling uneasy about the ethical and psychological ramifications of the situation means that you're a good person. :)

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