She’s still dying on Facebook.

Joscelyne’s Facebook profile.

Yesterday morning, I nearly choked on my coffee. The near-choke came while reading “She’s Still Dying on Facebook” at The Atlantic by Julie Binton. The story recounts the last days of Binton’s former BFF Leah which is on display in perpetuity on Facebook.

I’ve been obsessed with Lea’s Facebook profile since January 2006, when she joined, just a month after I created my own account. In high school, we had a consuming friendship—together we did things we’d never do alone, like skinny-dip in Lake Michigan while rolling on Ecstasy. In summer, our sleepovers lasted weeks. At 1 a.m., we’d sneak out and trudge through the woods to a field, where we smoked cigarettes and got blackout drunk on wine stolen from our mothers. We talked a lot about getting wasted and breaking out of dead-end northern Michigan; anthems of small-town girls. We called ourselves unbreakable without a hint of irony. Our friendship took place entirely offline—which is strange, because for almost 10 years, most of my interaction with Lea has been with her Facebook profile.

A few months ago, motivated by the purchase of an iPhone 5, I refreshed all the apps on my phone. I barely use any of them—Chase, Twitter, Groupon, Facebook, iPeriod—and normally wouldn’t bother upgrading unless prompted by some breakdown of functionality. One of Facebook’s newer features is a change to private messages, so that they’re less like email and more like instantmessaging. Now, if you visit someone’s profile and click on the messages button, a circular icon containing their profile picture appears on the screen, and with it, the entirety of your mutual correspondence.

On March 2, more than four years ago now, Lea died of substance-abuse-related liver failure. June 10 would have been her 27th birthday. This time of year is when she’s always most on my mind, and I’m sure that some Facebook technician who keeps track of what we all do on the site would report that my visits to Lea’s profile increase exponentially as the weather gets warmer. I don’t know how, exactly, I managed to open up my old messages with Lea. I want to say that Facebook put the messages there—that I didn’t click the button, that they just appeared, Lea’s face popping up because she had something to say, she wanted to chat. But I must have clicked. Maybe by accident. Still, I can’t ignore the pull of my bookworm’s interpretation, arguing that technology is the closest human beings come to magic. I know nothing about the way the Internet works. I still half-believe the Internet is simply air. So why isn’t it plausible that Lea’s messages appeared in response to how much I miss her, to my own guilt about her death.

…

My freshman year, Lea’s status updates were consistently funny and weird and her. A year later they’d become disjointed: Hallmark quotes that the Lea I’d known would have made fun of, misspellings, late-night fragments that had clearly been posted after a hundred drinks and who knows what else. Her profile pictures changed too. Early-on, she was Lea at the beach, grinning through a sunburn. Later, she was Lea 30 pounds thinner than I’d ever seen her, her cheeks squirrel-swollen, staring at something beyond the camera. When I went home to Michigan on winter break, I’d bump into her at bars and parties, or get incomprehensible calls from her in the middle of the night. We’d grown apart swiftly and irrevocably. I might drink too much with my high school friends over the holidays, but in New York I was living the kind of life Lea and I had imagined for ourselves, if only we could escape Michigan. At 19, I didn’t understand what her life had become, and why she hadn’t grown up with the rest of us, why she couldn’t get it together.

 

…

The last message between me and Lea was sent on February 21, 2007, and it’s from her to me. But it’s a message I hadn’t ever seen until I updated my Facebook app a few months ago—seven years after Lea sent it, four years after she died. Right after Lea’s funeral, I spent one terrible afternoon going through a shoebox full of old notes we’d passed in class and crappy photos we’d taken with drugstore disposable cameras; I didn’t think about what Lea might have left for me online. When I saw the message years later I stopped breathing. For one disorienting, searing second it was like she’d died again in that instant. I experienced an almost physical sensation, as if I’d clumsily dropped something fragile onto the floor and watched it shatter. The worst part: It wasn’t the only unanswered message from Lea to me—there’d been more, along with many that I’d answered with pretentious, dashed-off notes about life in New York, glib acknowledgments of her stint in rehab, of the fact that her dad had moved out, of her depression.

 

Lea died the first time soon after she joined Facebook, when I witnessed her transformation into someone she would have mocked and pitied. She died again, a smaller death, a year or so before her real-world one, when she basically stopped posting altogether. On March 2, she died publicly, her wall turning into the memorial it is now. To me, she’s died again and again since then. The posts remembering her are fewer and fewer, months apart sometimes. When I rediscovered our messages, she died again—in a different way, because I’d come face to face with how I failed her. Facebook has made her death a sort of high-concept horror movie. How many more times will I grieve her? How many more details from my past, from Lea’s past, are buried online, waiting for me to uncover them?

I’ve had that experience, seemingly a million times over with Joscelyne’s death. Mutual friends tagging her in some picture or status update and it showing up in my Newsfeed and triggering an immediate rush of emotions- bewilderment, fear, hope and sadnesss. Jos has died so many times now. This has also meant a continual death of part of me, too- I’ll never be anyone’s big sister again. 

Yesterday was also Jos’ daughter Sophia’s birthday. It’s a wonder I managed to keep that coffee down.