In January 2007, I traveled to Israel for a two-week trip with a busload of fellow twenty-somethings I had never met before, and would never see again. Among the crowd of would-be partiers and spoiled princesses, much less excited to explore a new country than to get drunk off international beer, one couple stood out as different. I first met them at the airport in New York as we were checking our bags for the twelve-hour flight. Julie, dark-haired and homely, was finishing up a degree in elementary education. David, handsome despite his already receding hairline, worked in his father’s auto detailing shop (names have been changed to protect privacy). Both had thick, New Jersey accents and serious expressions. They were planning on getting engaged that spring, they announced when they saw the ring on my finger, and married the year after that. It was easy to imagine them sitting on a living room sofa, middle-aged.

After we all returned from Israel, scattering to our respective homes across the East Coast, Facebook became our groups’ main – and pretty much only – means of keeping in touch. Content to limit my contact with most of my fellow travelers to the occasional status update, I didn’t even realize Julie and David had fallen off my radar. I assumed they had gone back to life as usual in New Jersey, where they were living out their humble, happy dreams.

Unfortunately that wasn’t the case. In May, at the age of twenty-four, David was hit by a car while crossing the street and killed. Months later, when I found out, it was appropriately enough via a Facebook message. After a year and a half of silence, Julie wrote to me to ask how I was doing, but really to tell me she felt crushed, how the universe had taken away the love of her life. I didn’t know what to say. I remembered admiring David’s maturity, but I couldn’t recall where he’d went to school, which sports he played, anything. I went to his Facebook profile to glean some details for a more personalized note of mourning.

When I opened the page, however, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. His status had been updated only yesterday. New photos of him were uploaded last week. That morning a friend had posted on his wall with an inside joke from a fishing trip. Had I confused him with the wrong person? Was this David still alive?

No, Julie later told me. She and David’s family had decided to use the profile page as a sort of ongoing memorial. When she held a remembrance ceremony in his name, she posted the event under his name. When people she met commented on missing David, she friended using his account. In place of notes left on his grave, his Facebook wall is lined with comments like “You were in my dreams last night,” and “I still can’t believe your gone.” I’d expected, I suppose, to see David’s profile frozen in time on the day he died, a snapshot of who he had been. Instead, his online persona was living on, using his loved ones – and social networking — as proxies.

This isn’t the first time a profile has been turned into a memorial. MyDeathSpace.com specializes in stories of those have died, and links to their MySpace pages – which loved ones have often reshaped into heartfelt goodbyes. David’s story different somehow. His profile is dynamic, ever changing. You have to read deep to realize he has died at all. It’s as if, in a time and a generation that values online communication so highly, we’ve found a new way to talk to those we’ve lost, to keep them alive. From beyond the grave, David’s digital identity – old wall posts, even the Facebook games he was playing — carry bits of him onward. He passes down a version of his life that says more who he was than any one photo or memory, a version we trace backwards, like following footsteps left in the dirt. And if a person’s data is so important, who owns and controls it after they've died? Do we need to start bequeathing social networking logins in our wills?

As for David’s memorial profile, it’s seen less and less activity since the beginning of 2009. In his profile picture, which has remained the same since Christmas, he sits on a rock by the ocean, head in his hand. It’s been two weeks since someone left him a wall comment, nearly six since anyone tagged him in a photo. Last month Julie listed herself as “in a relationship” with a different man, before quickly removing relationship status from her profile altogether. In her recently uploaded photos, flanked by her new boyfriend, she looks happy. Perhaps soothed by the ability to communicate with his memory through Facebook, it seems his friends and family are finally moving on.

[Header image courtesy of Flickr user LWR; inline image courtesy of Flickr user pshab; both via a Creative Commons license]