Metro Atlanta mourners connect online to remember, grieve

Don Henderson was fluent in grief. A church musician for 40 years, he estimated he’d played at thousands of funerals. But everything changed last month when his son, John, was shot dead by robbers who burst into Standard Food & Spirits in Grant Park, where he worked.

Bringing John’s body home to Baltimore was “the hardest thing [I’d] ever done as a husband and father,” Don wrote two days later in his 27-year-old son’s online guest book.

Over the next three weeks, the digital guest book swelled with nearly 200 messages posted by family, friends and complete strangers who’d all been affected in some way by the popular Atlanta bartender’s death. His father himself added three more, including one inviting friends and “the citizens of Atlanta” to a memorial service at the restaurant Six Feet Under on Memorial Drive.

“I’m so experienced with death,” the elder Henderson said that night. “But it’s the first time I’ve mourned online.”

He’s in good company. Death has found important new life in cyberspace.

It’s a trend on view in metro Atlanta, where two recent deaths have galvanized people to go online in enormous numbers and make meaningful connections. From raising money in the deceased’s name or forming community groups to prevent more deaths such as Henderson’s, to exchanging condolences and thanks in ways unthinkable in the pre-Internet Age, they’re forging positive social networking experiences from something once kept at arm’s length.

“It’s opened up new avenues,” said Janet Allison of Gainesville, who posted a message on Meredith Emerson’s guest book soon after the murdered Gwinnett County hiker’s body was discovered in January 2008. Allison doubted her message of comfort would ever have found its way to Emerson’s parents in Colorado if she’d tried to send a card. “I wanted to let her family know people were really thinking about them.”

Like Allison, Jon Aiken had never signed a guest book before he went online to share his memories of being waited on by the “warm, funny” John Henderson. “It’s the modern equivalent of when everyone in the community came together in death,” mused Aiken, 60, a lifelong Grant Park resident. “When I was growing up, a relative who died was not laid out in the funeral home. He was brought home and everyone came to visit. In this electronic age, it’s the way the community comes together to mourn and visit.”

‘Beyond expectations’

Indeed, when people die now, they’ll likely get memorial pages on Facebook or Flickr before the first sympathy bouquet arrives. Their obituaries may appear on Tributes.com, which recently began offering the chance to light a “virtual candle” in someone’s memory.

Or on Legacy.com, the leading “memorialization” Web site, which publishes publicly accessible guest books for more than 700 newspapers, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Legacy posts some 800,000 guest book entries per month — up from roughly 750 a month in 2001 — primarily users’ cherished memories and condolences for both celebrities and “ordinary” people.

It’s all part of the burgeoning commercial death industry, as funeral home paid-death notices in local newspapers now find potentially lucrative afterlife on for-profit Web sites. For instance, clicking on the “Express Your Sympathy” ad on Tributes.com’s home page takes users to the 1-800-Flowers site, while Legacy.com offers the opportunity to create Memorial Web sites, complete with photos, audio and video, for $49 per year.

“We’re the first to admit it’s grown far beyond our initial expectations,” said Legacy chief operating officer Hayes Ferguson. “We are building a virtual community of very real people who no longer can talk over the fence or run into each other.”

That “talking” may be loudest in Georgia, where 86 percent of all guest books published with an obituary received entries in 2008. That’s compared with 73 percent elsewhere.

Are we more wired here? Or simply more comfortable with death than, say, the average Yankee?

“I’d say it’s that people in the South are storytellers,” ventured Janice Hume, an associate journalism professor at the University of Georgia and the author of the book “Obituaries in American Culture.” “And telling stories is a lot of what these [guest book postings] are about.”

Emerson made Legacy’s Top Ten Most Visited Guest Books list in 2008. Another four Georgians, including longtime Braves broadcaster Skip Caray (who fell out of the No. 10 spot at the last minute) were in the Top 50. And then there’s Uga VI, the beloved bulldog mascot of UGA football, whose death last June fell into a category Legacy deems “special events.” Otherwise, his 208-page guest book (nearly 2,100 entries) also would have been in the Top 50.

As aggravating as such rankings can be, the positives of death-related social networking far outweigh the negatives for many people. Allison’s feeling of powerlessness diminished after she posted on Emerson’s guest book.

“I wasn’t able to go along when they did the searches [for Emerson],” she said. “I really wanted to do something. Writing it made me feel better.”

A rallying point

Sometimes social networking turns into hands-on action.

Dan Almasy’s emotions ran the gamut from anguish to anger when Henderson was killed just a few blocks from his home.

Almasy wrote in the guest book: “It’s quite possible that our city, Atlanta, will be forever changed by what happened to John.”

He backed up his words by becoming a Facebook member of Atlantans Together Against Crime, a grassroots group formed after Henderson’s shooting. Through it, Almasy and his wife have turned out for meetings and protest vigils and have offered the effort their services as professional photographers.

“This is my neighborhood, this happened to a guy close to my age, and I wanted to know, ‘What can I do?’ ” Almasy, 29, said passionately. “All these things have given myself and others a way to participate and support that may not otherwise have happened. It’s an amazing use of technology and the Internet to get involved with the community.”

UGA’s Hume says this groundswell in networking around death means obituaries no longer are the exclusive purview of well-known people and that the portraits we gain of the deceased are, well, more humanized.

“We find all kinds of real people participating who would have been cut out of the process before,” Hume said.

Indeed, Henderson’s guest book is filled with moving, occasionally funny messages posted by former classmates, long-ago sweethearts, recent co-workers and people who knew him as a friendly neighborhood fixture. Even in the midst of their grief — or perhaps because of it — his parents seemed grateful for what they’d read.

“John related to people across all barriers,” Don Henderson marveled. “It was so good for his mother and me to hear all these stories. We learned so much more about our son.”