Through all of the various revamps and stylesheets, some aspects of Facebook remain. Such as the penchant for reminders. Five of your friends are having birthdays, and here are some people that you might know based on common friends. The latest incarnation is prompts to nudge those with no profile pictures, or reminders to re-connect with people you haven’t talked with in a while.

Here’s Scott.

“You haven’t talked on Facebook lately. Write on his wall.”

Well, there’s a pretty good reason for that. He died almost a year ago.

At that time, I wrote about his passing, and about the small bit of peace Facebook afforded him. It was a vehicle for absolution, allowing him to pass knowing that old wrongs had been forgiven.

In the days and weeks after, his wall became a happy place, as friends new and old shared pictures and thoughts and memories. Scott’s profile became the scrapbook that he would have enjoyed, curated and moderated by his fiance and another close friend. Yet it is still more than a little haunting that he can suddenly pop up as active.

Willing the Virtual

At the time, none of us knew there was a way to make that transition to a memorial page. In fact, here is a great breakdown on what happens to your social networks and online accounts when you die. I never gave the topic much thought, until Adele McAlear pitched a proposal for a panel discussion at South by Southwest Interactive, called “Posts Mortem: Death and Digital Legacy.”

And even with that, I have been lax in “bequeathing” my accounts to my family, so websites and domains stay put if something were to happen to me. However, to be fair, many providers have no real provision for that, and it might not be possible to do in some instances. I’m glad that now some people are asking the right questions that stand to make the process easier on everyone.

Scott is gone, but he is certainly not forgotten. Not while Facebook continues to flash him up on the side of my screen.