In all cases, Bickert explains in the post, Facebook attempts to make decisions that respect what the deceased would have wanted for their account. But there's an element that's somewhat similar to the challenges of traditional funeral rites: “Sometimes, however, we simply don’t know what the person would have wanted,” she writes. “If a bereaved spouse asks us to add her as a friend to her late husband’s profile so she can see his photos and posts, how do we know if that’s what her husband would have wanted? Is there a reason they were not previously Facebook friends? Does it mean something if she had sent him a friend request when he was alive and he had rejected it? What if the wife had simply never been on Facebook until after her husband’s death?”