IT IS that time of the year again when we remember our beloved dead. At this exact moment, a realization strikes me: my Facebook friends who have crossed over into the Great Beyond still remain on my Friends List.
It is incredibly easy to bid them a final goodbye. With just the click of a button next to their name, they are gone. Yet, that is something I have never done. Nor have I ever skidded through my list to deliberately start deleting people—whether they are inactive users, those pesky individuals who love to share troll-inspired misinformation and fake news, or those I haven't seen in so long that I have forgotten why I accepted their friend requests in the first place. Perhaps I am simply too busy to bother, rarely spending enough time on Facebook to justify overhauling my account to root out obsolete connections. Or perhaps, I feel deeply ill at ease with the word "unfriend," especially in the case of my wife, who passed away in 2011. I like to think I honor her by remembering the good times we shared, and by treasuring what she left behind for me and our family
Rosalie had been my Facebook friend since 2009. She seldom updated her timeline and never got around to posting a cover photo. Back then, she only accessed Facebook through my desktop or laptop. There were no ubiquitous internet services on mobile devices like smartphones or feature phones, and internet speeds were nowhere near as fast as they are today. We also had three growing children to raise. She kept herself busy, thoroughly enjoying her role as a "stage mother" during our daughter’s ballet and aerobics performances. Her final post, written four months before her death, read: "to all my friendship thank you friends, miss you all." It stands as digital proof of how rarely she visited her account.
Aside from my wife, other departed friends still occupy spaces on my list. Topping them is my brother-in-law, Arturo Gundran Jr., who died of a stroke the very same year as my wife, his sister. That double tragedy left our family devastated; my wife had been exceptionally close to her brother. Also dwelling on my list are the accounts of my second cousin, Ronald Carrido—a young police officer and the sole breadwinner of his family, who succumbed to heart illness last July; my writer friend, Veronica Hernandez, whom I met during a PR project at our agency before she passed away from an illness last April; and my former student, Louie Maningding, who left behind a promising teaching career and this world just this October.
Then there are the acquaintances: Frederick Aromin, my wife’s nephew from La Union, who lived with us in our Bulacan home for a time; Sha-sha Brillantes, a fellow member of GUMIL Filipinas, whom I met for the first and last time at a writers’ convention in Gonzaga, Cagayan, back in 2014; Froi Santos, an architect and friend of my brother; and Tina Alconis, a young mother and former staff member of Tandem during our college days, who tragically died during childbirth last month. There are others I never met in person but shared brief online interactions with, like Joe Padre, a California-based writer who invited me to contribute to his blog, and Emerson Somera, a soldier who dreamed of becoming a writer before an ambush by bandits in Sulu stole those dreams away.
They have vanished from our physical world, but they remain anchored in my heart and in the hearts of their closest families and friends. Perhaps it is true that when someone we love deeply leaves this world, it becomes incredibly difficult to let go of the tangible reminders they leave behind. That includes, it seems, their digital presence on Facebook. Their profile pictures remain—assuming you haven't unfriended them—gently haunting our feeds. There are tags from photos documenting the moments you shared, and Facebook mechanically continues to pop up reminders for their birthdays year after year. Deep down, perhaps we secretly long to see a new post or status update from them.
Why do we resist "unfriending" them? Do we really owe it to anyone to do so?
To paraphrase Shakespeare, the good our departed have done may be interred with their bones in a silent grave, but their Facebook posts live after them. In this digital age, where people rarely write personal notes and letters by hand anymore, erasing every online trace of them feels like an unforgivable act—especially those digitally captured expressions of their love, happiness, and vibrant lives.
Facebook does have a policy that recognizes the importance of a profile in remembering deceased loved ones. A family member can request to turn the profile into a "memorialized" state, which restricts the account's privacy to friends only. The profile and wall remain active, allowing loved ones to post memories and condolences. Yet, although I occasionally toy with the idea of shifting my wife's profile into this status, I never seem to find the courage to go through with "killing" her Facebook self. The connection I share with my wife is something no one can ever delete.
So, what does it truly mean to unfriend the dead? What message are we sending if we click that button? Perhaps this is simply one of those profound questions that lacks an easy answer. Even so, you are not a bad person if you find that you need to do it just to move on.
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