Facebook and Birthdays

A few days I got a reminder from Facebook that it was someone's, who is on my friends list, birthday. Not surprising or abnormal. I am sure that there are hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of such reminders sent out every day. We all get them - I suspect that most people do what I do - we ignore them or else we send a brief greeting feeling a wee bit guilty that we had not remembered on our own. It so often feels as the birthday's wishes are not really meant. This birthday reminder system from Facebook irritates me so much that I have deleted my birth date from my profile.

What was so troublesome about this reminder is that my friend has been dead for over two years.

The person whose birthday it was last week was a dear friend - I miss her. I think about her often as I go through various activities. Surprisingly often I make reference to her in my conversations with others. I quite frequently wonder what her response would be to one of my blogs. I do not need Facebook to remind me of her birth date. I do not need a Facebook notice to remind me that she has passed on.

I know that I am not the only person who gets these types of reminders. As we all age, and more and more of our friends pass, there will be thousands of profiles of dead people floating through the Facebook world. Profiles that are never updated -frozen forever in time. As far as I know, there is no easy mechanism for anyone to delete those profiles - unless one has the individuals password.

I can understand why some family members might not want to be the one to delete the profile - it would make everything feel so permanent. It may be that friends want the individual page left up for a while so that they can reach out to mutual friends. But one has to wonder if the individual themselves would want to have their profile forever locked in a never changing vacuum. Perhaps there needs to be an addendum added to all wills instructing the executor to delete the Facebook profile or Facebook could quite simply delete profiles where there has been no activity for two years.

Paradoxically I know that I am part of the problem. All that I would have to do is to delete her from my list of friends and I would never again get another reminder. I guess I am just not ready to do that.

Facebook might have numerous advantages - being reminded forever of someone's death is not one of them.