My first real, up-close experience with death was as an adult, sitting at the deathbed of one of my closest friends, Joe. I’d known him since high school, and he was the silliest, wisest, cleverest person I knew. At just 36, he was dying of a rare pulmonary cancer. For one week, alongside his family and other loved ones, I stayed with him in hospice, held his hand as he dozed in and out of morphine sleep. I listened to his labored, rattling breathing, slow and pained, wondering with each breath if it would be his last. Until finally, it was.Moments after his death, Joe's father coaxed me back into the room.“Come see Joey,” he said, gently putting his hand on my back, “He looks so peaceful.”My feet wouldn’t move forward. I couldn’t make them. When I finally did, I sat on the edge of the bed next to his body, tentatively. I touched his arm, which was still warm. I put my hand on his chest. His dad quietly left the room.And then I howled. I don’t know where in me the sound came from, but I howled. I bawled, I lay my body half on top of his like an Italian widow in the movies, and I wept. When I was entirely empty of tears, I got up and went back out to the hall to be with the living.We can’t have these visceral experiences with every death in our lives. But perhaps this is why experiencing Louise’s death online has left me feeling so empty and unsatisfied.Facebook allows users to change a profile page to a memorial page , but often people just leave the profile up. My grandmother died in July, and her page is still active. A whole string of birthday messages is still on her timeline.In a great piece on what she calls “ Stifled Grief ,” Michelle Steinke writes about the expectations we often have around grieving and when it is supposed to end. “There is no moving on,” she writes, “there is only moving forward...Grief is an ugly mess full of pitfalls, missteps, sinking, and swimming.”In the real world, finding tools to manage grief feels impossible enough. On Facebook, the oversimplification of the trauma of grief itself felt, to me, unbearable.“I feel like I’ve been punched in the heart,” my husband emailed me from work later in the day after we found out about Louise. The disbelief and sadness wash over slowly and at unpredictable moments.Louise and I are still Facebook friends. In a few months, Facebook will remind me to wish her a happy birthday. I still visit her page; I reread messages from her. I am learning a new way to grieve. Maybe there is comfort that she’s still there, that friends continue to post on her page about how special she was and how much they will miss her. I will miss her too.I look at my own Facebook posts — a photo of my husband on the summit of Mt. Whitney, that amazing new Sia video, pictures of my cats. All of us will die (spoiler alert), and that is terrifying and incomprehensible. But we will still live on, on Facebook.