Chattanooga: Grieving on the Web
By Lauren Gregory, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.
May 26–While he was in Iraq and she remained an ocean away in Tunnel Hill, Ga., high school sweethearts James Michael Gluff and Kendra Hope Gluff relied on the Internet to keep them close.
In fact, Mrs. Gluff had a sweet exchange with her husband through the computer just eight hours before uniformed Marines arrived at her door Jan. 19 to tell her he had been killed in an explosion.
“I told them they made a mistake. I had just talked to him online,” Mrs. Gluff recalled. “I spent the next two weeks staring at the computer.”
During that time, she began writing about his death and professing her love for him on her MySpace page, which is decorated with red, white and blue graphics declaring her a Marine wife.
The large tattoo she had inscribed with “In loving memory, my hero, LCpl. James Michael Gluff” on her left arm didn’t seem enough of a memorial. Mrs. Gluff kept turning to the social networking site, realizing the emotional connection she had with her husband had become intertwined with their cyber-connection while he was abroad.
This is a feeling shared by many of those grieving war deaths, according to Dr. Naeemah Clark, an assistant professor of journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee, who says Lance Cpl. Gluff joins legions of fallen American troops suspended online between life and death.
Studies on these types of online memorials are just beginning, Dr. Clark said, so it is unclear exactly how many such pages might exist. She said the subject first caught her attention when she noticed the large number of sites cropping up in the aftermath of several school shootings, including the 2007 tragedy at Virginia Tech, where a student killed 32 students and teachers before taking his own life.
Comparing that to letters published in the campus newspaper at Kent State University following shootings at the Ohio school in 1970, Dr. Clark said the Internet appears to have become the modern platform for communitywide grieving.
“It’s just another way of communicating,” said Dr. Clark, who has heard of funeral videos being posted on YouTube. “Especially as the everyday person is becoming the content provider, I think it’s only going to expand.”
As a member of a younger generation, Mrs. Gluff, 21, likely does not separate interpersonal communication from online communication in the same way her parents might, Dr. Clark said. Therefore, it makes sense that she would try to maintain a connection to her husband online.
messages to the fallen
Several months after the lance corporal’s death, Mrs. Gluff still maintains a MySpace page for her husband, professing her feelings for all to see.
“I love him — not loved — love him with everything that I have in me. I will never stop loving him,” her page states. “If I could look into the future and see what has happened, I would still (have) married him.”
She tells her husband to rest in peace and that she cannot wait until she reunites with him.
These sentiments are not unlike those expressed by grieving mother Ginny Edgerton, of Rocky Face, Ga., who posts messages regularly on the “Fallen Heroes of Operation Iraqi Freedom” online memorial.
Mrs. Edgerton’s son, Army Spc. Marshall Edgerton, died in an explosion in December 2003 at age 27.
“I (realize) that we are only (separated) by my time here on Earth,” Mrs. Edgerton wrote in a message dated March 8, 2008. “It gives me peace to know that one day God will call me home and we will be a family again. … You will always be in my heart. Till I see you again. … I love you.”
Others go beyond those posthumous memorials by maintaining a deceased person’s MySpace page, Dr. Clark said.
Lana McDonald, of Ooltewah, says she signed on to the MySpace account of her son, Pfc. Travis Haslip, after his death to help connect with some of his friends. But after locating them, she saw no more need for the page.
Neither did Justin Lataille, of Pittsburg, Pa., the friend and fellow soldier she got to know in the process.
The last comments on Pfc. Haslip’s MySpace page, which still lists him as living in Baghdad, Iraq, are from his sister Rachel in late April 2007, a few weeks before his death.
“It really isn’t the same without you here,” she wrote, catching him up on gossip about their friends and mentioning an upcoming party.
Mr. Lataille, who left the Army to attend school, said he never has been a fan of writing Pfc. Haslip on MySpace.
“It can be a coping mechanism for some people, like visiting someone’s grave or something,” he said. “But I don’t really see the point. I think it draws more attention to the fact that they’re dead.”
Jan Dunkin, the stepmother of Sgt. Shawn Dunkin, who died in an explosion in Iraq in February 2007, agreed. She would rather focus on her own happy memories with her stepson. She said she would eliminate his MySpace page altogether if she could.
“We can’t get it off, because nobody knows his password,” Mrs. Dunkin said.
outlet for grief
On the other hand, Kathy Chambers, of Ringgold, Ga., loves that her son’s MySpace page still is up and running. Though Lance Cpl. Will Chambers drowned in Iraq last July, his younger sister Summer has updated the site, which now proclaims that he is “Happily in Heaven.”
“He obviously left good memories behind for everybody,” said Mrs. Chambers, who talks to her son at his grave at least once a day.
He receives regular messages from friends, including his close friend Hannah Ashley. In one of her recent posts, dated April 10, Ms. Ashley exclaimed: “I miss you so much!! I think about (you) every day and I don’t know what else to do. I almost went to your grave tonight but I didn’t think I could handle it.”
The site provides a healthy outlet for her grief, allowing her to handle her emotions on her own terms, she wrote in an e-mail.
“With his MySpace still being set up, it helps a lot,” she wrote. “When I wanna talk to him or have something on my mind, I’ll just leave it there. I know he is looking out for me.”
Sam Harris, a grief counselor and patient advocate at Erlanger hospital, said letting out feelings can be a normal part of the grieving process, which can last for years. Posting messages online is not unlike writing a letter to someone who has died and reading it at his or her gravesite, he said. This can be a way to say anything left unsaid and approach some type of closure within the relationship.
However, Mr. Harris said he would become concerned if this practice continued for a long period because it could delay a loved one’s passage through the stages of grief: denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance.
“It can be a healthy outlet,” he said, “but it cannot be too prolonged. It is just a part of the healing process.”
The family of 1st Sgt. Aaron Jagger sees their MySpace tribute as a means of keeping a legacy alive rather than a space to dwell in their misery. Because their father had such a passion for music, his daughters Nicole and Kirsten Jagger say they use MySpace to showcase that.
The songs allow them to hear his confident, countrified lilt whenever they want and picture exactly how the veins on his neck would pop if he were performing in person.
“That is the most important thing — not forgetting the people that passed away,” Kirsten Jagger said. “Because that is something that would make people feel like he died in vain, people being forgotten for their sacrifices.”
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