David Baxter PhD
Late Founder
Web pages help parents keep ties with kids who died
By Mary Ann Roser, AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Loved ones keep memories alive with social networking sites.
Kate von Alt is savoring each post as she reads aloud from her son Garrett's MySpace page. Today is Oct. 15: Garrett's Sweet 16th birthday.
"Happy birthday, baby, ha-ha," a friend writes. "Around this time we would always fight because I'm older. Laugh out loud. I love you and happy birthday."
Von Alt reads a few more messages and then whips out Garrett's cell phone and checks for messages. "Happy birthday, my sexy sweet 16," a girl's voice says. Von Alt, 49, wipes at tears as she plays three more voice mails, standing in the bedroom of her Cedar Park home.
Garrett won't be home today to enjoy the greetings. He won't see the message his twin brother, Duncan, posted on MySpace. Or the one his mom, a public health microbiologist, plans to write later. Garrett Russell died Feb. 17 in a head-on collision that killed him at the scene.
Fourteen miles away in the Gracywoods subdivision, Debbie Crowley, 55, reads posts on her daughter Erin's MySpace and Facebook pages. Erin had greetings for her 20th birthday Sept. 13, though her pages don't get as many posts as they once did. Erin died of a brain tumor April 25, 2007, nine days after her class at St. Michael's Catholic Academy elected her homecoming queen. Like von Alt, Crowley finds the messages comforting, even the ones that make her cry.
"To know she's alive for others keeps her alive (to me)," said Crowley, a pre-kindergarten teacher at St. Theresa's Catholic School.
With the popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, Erin and Garrett live on in cyberspace through personalized Web pages they created before their deaths, and through the messages and memorials posted by friends and family. This 21st century way of remembrance has, for some people, made the home computer the virtual equivalent to a graveside visit.
Counselors and parents said parents' visits to MySpace and Facebook to memorialize their child and keep in touch with their friends are generally healthy as long as they don't become an obsession.
Von Alt and Crowley are pioneers in a territory that has received scant study by researchers. Several academics studying the phenomenon said they don't know how many parents are using MySpace and Facebook to maintain connections to their deceased child and their child's friends, but they are eager to see how the practice is affecting parental grief.
In the United States, nearly 150,000 infants, children and young adults will die this year, according to the Compassionate Friends, a national organization with nearly 600 chapters aimed at helping bereaved parents.
'You never get over it'
Although online memorials established by funeral homes, companies and nonprofit groups have been around more than a decade, the use of social networking sites ? de rigueur for today's teens ? is relatively new, said Pamela Roberts, a professor of human development at California Sate University, Long Beach, who is researching the subject. Friendster was launched in 2002, MySpace in 2003-04, and Facebook opened to the public in 2006. Online memorials can carry a one-time fee of $55 or more, while keeping a social networking page going is free but offers parents and other survivors less control over the content.
Years ago, bereaved parents were told to say goodbye to their child and move on. Parents didn't talk much about their grief. Even though they talk more openly today, some parents say they still feel shunned by people who don't understand why they don't "let go."
"You never get over it," said Susan Cox, who founded the grief support group, For the Love of Christi in Austin with her husband, Don, after their daughter, Christi, was killed by a drunken driver in 1985. "It is love, and love never dies."
On memorial Web sites that Roberts calls "Web cemeteries," people light virtual candles and send virtual balloons in honor of their loved ones. Many Web sites can be maintained indefinitely.
"We always tell everyone: Do whatever it is that helps you," Cox said. "If this helps you, continue to do it. On the Internet, people are able to express how they feel; it's my time and my space. They can be more honest, more direct, without being judged. It has freed people to be more open about their feelings."
Mary Ellen Macdonald, a McGill University medical anthropologist who is studying parental bereavement, said people who haven't lost a child might see the impulse to connect with the child online as strange.
"If you're a child who has lost their parents, you're an orphan. If you're a spouse who has lost a husband, you're a widow, but in this society, if you're a parent who has lost a child, we don't have a word to talk about that," Macdonald said. "You're still wanting to maintain the legacy of this child but still trying to get on with your own life."
She hopes her research into parental grieving will provide insights into how parents grieve today.
Do Internet memorials "extend the pain and sadness?" she asked. "I don't know if it's good or bad."
Sometimes, the online visits sharpen their grief, von Alt and Crowley said. It can be painful looking at photos of their kids' friends and not seeing their child or reading about escapades their child will never share.
But the two mothers said they would not trade their forays to the sites ? places they never thought they'd venture before they experienced what every parent fears the most.
Staying connected
After Erin died, Crowley ? whose house rule was that she have access to her kids' computer passwords ? said she went to Erin's Web sites a lot more frequently, checking for messages and reading her daughter's writings. "It was very hard reading the things she wrote," Crowley said. "It was (also) very touching. It was very, very beautiful."
Crowley sometimes was surprised. Erin, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 13, was asked on her MySpace page how she wanted to die. Her answer: in her sleep.
"And she pretty much did," Crowley said. "She went into a coma just for a day."
Garrett's death was so sudden ? he was a passenger in a friend's car ? that it was difficult for von Alt to think much about his MySpace page. But after one of Garrett's friends gave von Alt his password she found a community of friends there who continued posting messages to him, almost daily, pouring out their love and telling him how much they missed him. They expressed many of the emotions von Alt felt.
"It's kind of comforting to see how he's still touching everybody," von Alt said. She has kept up with Garrett's friends from Cedar Park High, who still gather at his house, just as Crowley maintains ties with Erin's close friends through Erin's Web pages.
"If I'm connected with them (online), I feel like I'm connected with her, in a way, in heaven," Crowley said. "I know she's hanging around with them."
For both mothers, it's comforting to see that their children haven't been forgotten.
"That's a thing you fear the most," Crowley said. The Web pages "keep her name on people's lips."
A healthy trend
The Internet also leads bereaved people to support groups and an online community of kindred spirits, a sanctuary that once eluded mourning parents.
By and large, parents and therapists see the trend as healthy.
"If the parent is doing nothing but waiting for the next memorial statement to be posted, I don't think that's healthy," said Khris Ford, an adjunct instructor in social work at the University of Texas and a grief and loss counselor. "I could see someone becoming addicted to keeping that concrete feedback about their child going."
But Ford, executive director of My Healing Place in West Lake Hills , said she hasn't seen that happen. Nor have other therapists.
"The parents want to gather stories about their kids and complete the memories of their child's lives," said Richard Tedeschi, a clinical psychologist, author and professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "I think it's generally a healthy thing for people to take action like this and connect with people who have loving feelings for the person."
Roberts, the California researcher, said that when she interviewed 209 people in 2006 who had created "Web cemeteries," she found that 91 percent said they would create another one, and 85 percent said they intended to keep the memorial online indefinitely.
Roberts is now studying MySpace use by bereaved parents and said she has heard a few complaints about finding hurtful messages. Mostly, though, she considers it "a wonderful thing to have those connections with people who knew your child."
Debbie and her husband, Tim, are using the Internet in other ways to remember Erin. They mostly use CaringBridge, a Web site for families who want to provide updates about seriously ill family members, where they post Erin's poems and other writings. They also plan to launch the Erin Crowley Foundation, which will raise money for St. Michael's, the Dell Children's Medical Center and the Ronald McDonald House, which awarded Erin a college scholarship and now offers one in her name.
Von Alt has her own MySpace page and says writing about Garrett is therapeutic. "I look at (MySpace) as another cave of exploration to know about him," she said. "I've learned more about my son after he's gone than I would have known if he didn't" die.
She discovered that Garrett smoked ? something she frowns on. She has read his blog and "found writings that kind of tear your heart out." She has seen friends post photos of him she never knew existed, and "it's almost like I'm seeing him again," she said, starting to cry.
Garrett's MySpace page features a photograph of him cupping his cell phone in his hands and texting. A cousin enlarged the photograph, put clouds around Garrett and made the phone glow with a surreal light.
"We're using the cell phone as a symbol of the communication that still goes on between us," she said. "We can use all kind of technologies that represent the closeness we still feel for Garrett in our hearts and in our souls."
By Mary Ann Roser, AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Loved ones keep memories alive with social networking sites.
Kate von Alt is savoring each post as she reads aloud from her son Garrett's MySpace page. Today is Oct. 15: Garrett's Sweet 16th birthday.
"Happy birthday, baby, ha-ha," a friend writes. "Around this time we would always fight because I'm older. Laugh out loud. I love you and happy birthday."
Von Alt reads a few more messages and then whips out Garrett's cell phone and checks for messages. "Happy birthday, my sexy sweet 16," a girl's voice says. Von Alt, 49, wipes at tears as she plays three more voice mails, standing in the bedroom of her Cedar Park home.
Garrett won't be home today to enjoy the greetings. He won't see the message his twin brother, Duncan, posted on MySpace. Or the one his mom, a public health microbiologist, plans to write later. Garrett Russell died Feb. 17 in a head-on collision that killed him at the scene.
Fourteen miles away in the Gracywoods subdivision, Debbie Crowley, 55, reads posts on her daughter Erin's MySpace and Facebook pages. Erin had greetings for her 20th birthday Sept. 13, though her pages don't get as many posts as they once did. Erin died of a brain tumor April 25, 2007, nine days after her class at St. Michael's Catholic Academy elected her homecoming queen. Like von Alt, Crowley finds the messages comforting, even the ones that make her cry.
"To know she's alive for others keeps her alive (to me)," said Crowley, a pre-kindergarten teacher at St. Theresa's Catholic School.
With the popularity of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook, Erin and Garrett live on in cyberspace through personalized Web pages they created before their deaths, and through the messages and memorials posted by friends and family. This 21st century way of remembrance has, for some people, made the home computer the virtual equivalent to a graveside visit.
Counselors and parents said parents' visits to MySpace and Facebook to memorialize their child and keep in touch with their friends are generally healthy as long as they don't become an obsession.
Von Alt and Crowley are pioneers in a territory that has received scant study by researchers. Several academics studying the phenomenon said they don't know how many parents are using MySpace and Facebook to maintain connections to their deceased child and their child's friends, but they are eager to see how the practice is affecting parental grief.
In the United States, nearly 150,000 infants, children and young adults will die this year, according to the Compassionate Friends, a national organization with nearly 600 chapters aimed at helping bereaved parents.
'You never get over it'
Although online memorials established by funeral homes, companies and nonprofit groups have been around more than a decade, the use of social networking sites ? de rigueur for today's teens ? is relatively new, said Pamela Roberts, a professor of human development at California Sate University, Long Beach, who is researching the subject. Friendster was launched in 2002, MySpace in 2003-04, and Facebook opened to the public in 2006. Online memorials can carry a one-time fee of $55 or more, while keeping a social networking page going is free but offers parents and other survivors less control over the content.
Years ago, bereaved parents were told to say goodbye to their child and move on. Parents didn't talk much about their grief. Even though they talk more openly today, some parents say they still feel shunned by people who don't understand why they don't "let go."
"You never get over it," said Susan Cox, who founded the grief support group, For the Love of Christi in Austin with her husband, Don, after their daughter, Christi, was killed by a drunken driver in 1985. "It is love, and love never dies."
On memorial Web sites that Roberts calls "Web cemeteries," people light virtual candles and send virtual balloons in honor of their loved ones. Many Web sites can be maintained indefinitely.
"We always tell everyone: Do whatever it is that helps you," Cox said. "If this helps you, continue to do it. On the Internet, people are able to express how they feel; it's my time and my space. They can be more honest, more direct, without being judged. It has freed people to be more open about their feelings."
Mary Ellen Macdonald, a McGill University medical anthropologist who is studying parental bereavement, said people who haven't lost a child might see the impulse to connect with the child online as strange.
"If you're a child who has lost their parents, you're an orphan. If you're a spouse who has lost a husband, you're a widow, but in this society, if you're a parent who has lost a child, we don't have a word to talk about that," Macdonald said. "You're still wanting to maintain the legacy of this child but still trying to get on with your own life."
She hopes her research into parental grieving will provide insights into how parents grieve today.
Do Internet memorials "extend the pain and sadness?" she asked. "I don't know if it's good or bad."
Sometimes, the online visits sharpen their grief, von Alt and Crowley said. It can be painful looking at photos of their kids' friends and not seeing their child or reading about escapades their child will never share.
But the two mothers said they would not trade their forays to the sites ? places they never thought they'd venture before they experienced what every parent fears the most.
Staying connected
After Erin died, Crowley ? whose house rule was that she have access to her kids' computer passwords ? said she went to Erin's Web sites a lot more frequently, checking for messages and reading her daughter's writings. "It was very hard reading the things she wrote," Crowley said. "It was (also) very touching. It was very, very beautiful."
Crowley sometimes was surprised. Erin, who was diagnosed with a brain tumor at 13, was asked on her MySpace page how she wanted to die. Her answer: in her sleep.
"And she pretty much did," Crowley said. "She went into a coma just for a day."
Garrett's death was so sudden ? he was a passenger in a friend's car ? that it was difficult for von Alt to think much about his MySpace page. But after one of Garrett's friends gave von Alt his password she found a community of friends there who continued posting messages to him, almost daily, pouring out their love and telling him how much they missed him. They expressed many of the emotions von Alt felt.
"It's kind of comforting to see how he's still touching everybody," von Alt said. She has kept up with Garrett's friends from Cedar Park High, who still gather at his house, just as Crowley maintains ties with Erin's close friends through Erin's Web pages.
"If I'm connected with them (online), I feel like I'm connected with her, in a way, in heaven," Crowley said. "I know she's hanging around with them."
For both mothers, it's comforting to see that their children haven't been forgotten.
"That's a thing you fear the most," Crowley said. The Web pages "keep her name on people's lips."
A healthy trend
The Internet also leads bereaved people to support groups and an online community of kindred spirits, a sanctuary that once eluded mourning parents.
By and large, parents and therapists see the trend as healthy.
"If the parent is doing nothing but waiting for the next memorial statement to be posted, I don't think that's healthy," said Khris Ford, an adjunct instructor in social work at the University of Texas and a grief and loss counselor. "I could see someone becoming addicted to keeping that concrete feedback about their child going."
But Ford, executive director of My Healing Place in West Lake Hills , said she hasn't seen that happen. Nor have other therapists.
"The parents want to gather stories about their kids and complete the memories of their child's lives," said Richard Tedeschi, a clinical psychologist, author and professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. "I think it's generally a healthy thing for people to take action like this and connect with people who have loving feelings for the person."
Roberts, the California researcher, said that when she interviewed 209 people in 2006 who had created "Web cemeteries," she found that 91 percent said they would create another one, and 85 percent said they intended to keep the memorial online indefinitely.
Roberts is now studying MySpace use by bereaved parents and said she has heard a few complaints about finding hurtful messages. Mostly, though, she considers it "a wonderful thing to have those connections with people who knew your child."
Debbie and her husband, Tim, are using the Internet in other ways to remember Erin. They mostly use CaringBridge, a Web site for families who want to provide updates about seriously ill family members, where they post Erin's poems and other writings. They also plan to launch the Erin Crowley Foundation, which will raise money for St. Michael's, the Dell Children's Medical Center and the Ronald McDonald House, which awarded Erin a college scholarship and now offers one in her name.
Von Alt has her own MySpace page and says writing about Garrett is therapeutic. "I look at (MySpace) as another cave of exploration to know about him," she said. "I've learned more about my son after he's gone than I would have known if he didn't" die.
She discovered that Garrett smoked ? something she frowns on. She has read his blog and "found writings that kind of tear your heart out." She has seen friends post photos of him she never knew existed, and "it's almost like I'm seeing him again," she said, starting to cry.
Garrett's MySpace page features a photograph of him cupping his cell phone in his hands and texting. A cousin enlarged the photograph, put clouds around Garrett and made the phone glow with a surreal light.
"We're using the cell phone as a symbol of the communication that still goes on between us," she said. "We can use all kind of technologies that represent the closeness we still feel for Garrett in our hearts and in our souls."
