Facebook App Gives A Place To Grieve - Do You Know

One-Liner Pitch: Sanctri is a Facebook app for creating memorial pages for loved ones who have passed away.
Why It's Taking Off: Facebook doesn't offer specific tools to mourn, but with our digitally intertwined lives there is a need for a virtual destination to remember friends and family.

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It's probably happened to all of us. A friend, family member or acquaintance passes away, but the Facebook profile remains.
Jono Milner, founder of Sanctri, had this experience. "It was the most bizarre feeling," he says, describing how he wanted to post on this person's timeline, but it felt strange. Then, someone did post on this person's Facebook page — the mother. A number of people "liked" her post, which also felt weird, as the term "like" has a purely positive connotation.

Circlestech has written about how Facebook users deal with death before, both in how we grieve through digital mediums, and the limited options those grieving have in interacting the Facebook account of the deceased.

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It would seem that Facebook isn't the ideal place to deal with death, but as a network that already connects communities of loved ones, it's difficult to find a better platform on which to grieve.
That's why Milner decided to create Sanctri as a Facebook app, rather than a separate website.
On Sanctri, you can create a Sanctri for a person, or a community for a group (Remembering Grandparents, for example). You are then the admin for that page and can invite others to view the page or to contribute — your friends and family do need to sign up for Sanctri to be invited as contributors, but you can easily share the Sanctri link via Twitter, Facebook or email so they can opt in.

 

 

Along with the wall, where contributors can post images or comments, each page also has a Lifebook, which is essentially a digital scrapbook, split up into chapters, where you can add both text and images.
While the app seems most natural as a replacement for the Facebook account of a friend or relative who passed away, it can also be used for a loved one who passed away many years ago and perhaps never used Facebook.
Sanctri is one of the few apps where a deep tie-in with Facebook makes sense. Even if you have cousins you've never met all over the world, you might have connected with them on Facebook. If the one thing you share with these people is a grandparent who's passed away, Sanctri offers a place where it's both appropriate and tasteful to connect over that connection.

 

 

Interacting in Sanctri is similar enough to Facebook to be familiar, but with a few notable differences. When users post on a Sanctri, they are given five prompts: contribute a thought, share a memory, post a song, pledge to do something in honor of the person or donate to charity.
Dianne Gray, president of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation and a death and bereavement expert who is involved in Sanctri's creation, says that people in the US especially tend to grieve alone and to isolate themselves.
The prompts used by Sanctri ease users into expressing themselves. The app also includes a "moved" action to replace Facebook's "like."