I Love My Facebook Memories. I Hate My Facebook Memories.
Facebook is a cobwebbed attic that I can’t seem to leave.
The first time I posted a photo of my children to Facebook was in 2008 when Emily was 4 and Ana was 7. It wasn’t my plan to turn Facebook into a scrapbook of their lives, but that’s what ended up happening.
Ana died in 2017 at the age of 15. By then, I’d posted hundreds of photos of her throughout her childhood. My early grief was filled with emotional land mines — things that caught me off guard and made me weep or curl up in my bed unable to move.
Going food shopping and walking past her favorite snacks, driving by the funeral home where they’d taken her body, celebrating birthdays and holidays without her there, but especially those pervasive and unprompted Facebook memories — completely derailed me. They brought me to my knees.
For anyone lucky enough to not use Facebook, Memories is a feature that shows you something you posted on a given day in the past. It just…pops up in your feed, unprompted, like an evil clown offering you a lovely red balloon.
You can scroll past this tempting memory or hide it. Or, like me, you can click on a “Memories” link in your timeline to see all the photos and other stuff you posted on that same day over the years…
