But if these surreal pop-ups are sometimes funny, especially after some time as passed, they are often shocking and painful. The undead nature of the digital world causes the dead to die over and over and over again, and by extension repeatedly rips off the scabs that strive to form over these deep wounds. And I realize I’ve had it pretty easy compared to other people I’ve met through Modern Loss , the site I run. I wasn’t the man who could’ve sworn he was being punked by GoogleEarth when he looked up his childhood home only to see his dead dad mowing the lawn. Or the grad student who turned off her phone to do a day of research, only to casually check Facebook later and learn that her entire town was talking abouther dad’s death in a car accident earlier that afternoon. Or the mom who got repeated e-mails from the school district reminding her it was time to sign her kid up for kindergarten—the kid who’d died two years beforehand.