[size=18px]Online Memorials Bring Strangers and Friends Together in Community of Grief[/size]
By Yuki Noguchi, The Washington post

...As the country observes the memory of those who died in its wars, online memorials have altered acts of bereavement and become palliative retreats for some who grieve. Web sites dedicated to the deceased now number in the millions in the United States, and for those left behind, posting stories, photos and videos is a way of keeping a permanent record of the person's life. Material added to mark important days such as birthdays, Mother's Day and Memorial Day, or even notes left by well-wishing strangers help the page evolve, so the memorial itself can take on a kind of second life.

Viewers use the Web sites to find and comfort one another -- not only to facilitate communication from far-flung or long-lost friends who couldn't attend a funeral, but also to send messages from one dead soldier's wife to another, from one mourning mother to another or among those galvanized to fight a disease.

"I know it helps me grieve," said Williamsburg police officer Mark Schafer, whose son, Michael, an Army staff sergeant, died in battle in Afghanistan on July 25. Legacy.com, the site that hosts Michael Schafer's memorial, offers a free service for military personnel who died in Iraq or Afghanistan. "It helps me grieve when I see his pictures," Schafer said. "I feel proud that [people] can say some of things they say about him. People who don't even know him can go on there and tell him that they were proud."

While many non-Western cultures build rituals around death that allow a person to grieve over time, in highly individualistic societies, losing a loved one can be isolating, some psychologists say, which may be why some turn to the Web to reach outside their traditional social network.

"When death happens, we're so alone," said George Bonanno, a psychologist at Columbia University. "It would be nice if we had a sense of community, and maybe that's what the Internet provides."

Some sites such as Legacy.com, Memory-of.com and Mem.com have been around for about a decade and provide software tools for users to customize their Web pages. Legacy.com and Memory-of.com charge one-time fees of $50 to $100 for a permanent place on their sites. There are other, smaller sites started by funeral homes; still others are set up by individuals who purchase domain names in honor of the deceased. Another site, called MyDeathSpace, is less a memorial site than a bulletin board that posts stories about deceased members who kept profiles on the social networking site MySpace.

In some cases, dealing with death online is no prettier than it might be in real life: Companies that maintain memorial sites occasionally find themselves facing its darker side -- bitter divorces, sibling rivalries and inheritance feuds sometimes try to play themselves out through online memorials. Online sites, therefore, need their equivalent of groundskeepers to root out advertisers or tasteless postings. ...