For years I’ve noticed an interesting phenomenon on Facebook: Facebook users die, and their loved ones don’t remove their profiles; their Facebook page becoming a virtual shrine to their memory. Former coworkers of mine still post holiday eulogies on their mother’s Facebook page years after she passed away. My Aunt Judy is still on Facebook though she left for the great beyond two years ago. There is a convenience in being able to access the pictures and even words of a deceased loved one at the click of an icon wherever you happen to be. You can even access their memories on your phone.

Before social media and iPhones, photo albums were the sacred repositories of memory. I still enjoy the physical act of opening and closing a coffee table shrine, and the mild sense of reverence that I don’t get from clicking on an icon. Facebook space is crass, and accessing your deceased loved one’s page there seems puerile in comparison to an actual photo album of your loved ones. Not to mention the third-party aspect, wherein Facebook is a mediator between you and your memories. There is no mediator between you and that old photo album on your coffee table. It’s just you and your memories; a privacy that doesn’t exist on Facebook; an intimacy that you knew when your loved ones were still with you; free of the prying eyes of others and the snooping of the surveillance state and its Silicon Valley spooks. Viewed in that light, a Facebook page is a poor excuse of a shrine; it’s a desecration. I would no more want to preserve my Facebook page post-mortem than I would want to attend a Facebook chapel to worship; it trivializes the sacred. Like television commercials, social media trivializes everything.

Additionally, access to your virtual shrine depends on internet access and electricity. When either or both of those aren’t available, neither is the shrine.

While I understand the impulse to leave a deceased loved one’s Facebook page up — ostensibly out of respect for that person — it’s really because it feels like it would be a betrayal to remove it, like moving out of the house your kids grew up in. Years ago, when me and my daughter discussed moving, she got teary-eyed and said it would “…feel like we’re leaving Maxx behind.” Maxx was our recently deceased Jack Russell Terrier. And being sentimental, I felt the same way. But life continues, for gain and for loss. We move on, carrying our deceased in our hearts and memories, and in our photo albums, and nowadays on our social media platforms. Of all places, the heart is the most sacred shrine of memory. The mind is second. Photo albums are third. Social media is last — dead last.