On November 18, 2005, my brother died. My brother John was a junior actuary science and finance major at Rider University in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. He was stopped in traffic when he was rear-ended by a tractor trailer. He was eleven days shy of his 21st birthday.

His death was, to say the least, the most devastating thing that could have ever happened. My best friend was dead and at the age of 17 I was suddenly left as an only child. I was left to deal daily with my parents’ angry cries, to deal with suddenly being very different than all of my high school friends and to deal with trying to find a way to move on. All this in the midst of the regular things high school seniors think about: graduation and then college.

In the days following my brother’s death, Facebook was the one thing that was able to give my family and me comfort. Back in the days when the only people who could use Facebook were college students, my brother’s friend allowed me to sign onto her Facebook account to view his wall and watch as the flood of comments came in, as friends made “R.I.P. John Kostic” groups and wrote notes on Facebook about how they were feeling about his loss.

My parents would regularly ask me to sign onto Facebook for them to read the updates. College and high school students are awkward to begin with and when it comes to grief, they are especially so. My parents knew that if they ever wanted to know just how much John’s friends were hurting, they weren’t going to get that phone call or that visit. They were going to have to go online to read what they wrote to John himself.

When I got my email address for my college, the first thing I did was sign up for Facebook. Not just so I could be cool and have a Facebook account, but so that I would then be able to regularly read the updates on my brother’s wall on my own terms, without having to bug his friends for their passwords. (Note: I was able to do this because after a few months I found his Facebook password so I could confirm friendship.)

Of course, like any kind of grief, the wall posts and the discussion topics on his groups slowed as the number of days since his death increased, but every once in awhile someone will post something on his wall like “Thanks” or “Been thinking of you” and it always makes me wonder what has happened in that person’s life to make them feel compelled to post someone on a deceased friend’s wall like that.

I know that I’ll never ask and I’ll never know. However, knowing that there is a public memorial for my brother has made coming to terms with his death slightly easier. As if to say to the world, “He had a Facebook, so yes, he existed.”

While Facebook is still very much something that is the focus of our attention. For family, we created a site on Memory-Of. In high school, I had a friend who had a brother who died of Leukemia. He had created a site for his brother on Memory-of and when my brother died, I knew that since Facebook wasn’t easily assessible to my parents, I wanted a place for his friends to connect with them in case they wanted to.

I made a site for him on Memory-of for a flat fee of $55 — well worth the price. The site allows grievers to share photos and stories — much like they can on Facebook, but it’s a much more open platform. When you search for “John Kostic,” the site is one of the first things to come up. The site has a feature where people can “light candles,” which means they can write short notes in memory of that person.

My parents are constantly going back and forth asking each other if they saw who lit the latest candle or who has written a note. My uncle, who never had children of his own, and always has looked at my brother and myself as his own, keeps a running tab on the number of hits the site brings in each day. He’s noticed peaks on his birthday, the anniversary of his death and Christmas and other holidays. People feel like they need to be close to John and his Memory-of site and Facebook offer them that.

I sometimes wonder how obituaries will be handled in the future and I truly can’t imagine them continuing in the same capacity they have. My brother had obituaries in the Philadelphia Inquirer and other local papers and it was the single most depressing thing to see — a static news column of information and his face next to lots of pictures of old people who had lived long, full lives.

It pissed me off.

However, when I noticed the conversations that would take place on Facebook and Memory-of and saw how his friends were using it as a means to connect with one another, I could draw some sort of meaning from his loss that I couldn’t from other means.

Do you have any experiences with grief and social media? What are they?