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The strangers have drifted away now from the main memorial page for Anastasia de Sousa, the lone death in last year's Dawson College shooting. But 11 months later, her family and friends still post loving messages, telling her of trips, birthday parties and back-to-school plans, as if she might answer them. "I love you and miss you so much," her mother wrote there last week. "[I] will come by tomorrow to put candles in the candle holders at the cemetery."

After 11-year-old Ephraim Brown was killed by a stray bullet at a cousin's birthday party in Toronto's North York area in July, more than 10 tribute pages appeared on the popular social-networking site Facebook, including the subgroup "In Loving Memory to Ephraim Brown, aka Eazy E," which has more than 1,800 members who have posted 289 messages of condolence and regret, many beginning, "I didn't know Ephraim, but …"

The month before, the gunning down of 15-year-old Jordan Manners at his school brought more than 80 tribute pages on Facebook, many of them still active today, with the largest having more than 4,500 members.

And when two Ottawa Valley teenagers were killed by a station wagon as they crossed a country road on a foggy night this spring, flowers and hastily handwritten notes covered the farmer's fence where the accident happened, to be visited by sobbing classmates.

This is the modern way of mourning, the public enactment of once-private grief — the roadside memorials on highway shoulders, the online laments for young life lost, the dutiful candlelight vigils caught on camera.

The new narrative didn't begin with the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, 10 years ago this month. But she certainly defined it, with the endless images of flowers piled knee-deep outside Buckingham Palace and weepy-eyed British women and men lining up for days to sign their names to a book of condolences — while the Royal Family looked askance. "This is a family funeral," the Queen declares to prime minister Tony Blair in the Oscar-nominated movie, not "a fairground attraction." Her attitude is clearly an anachronism.

In a culture drifting away from the church and the confines of tradition, laypeople — and particularly teenagers — are rewriting the script for how we say our final farewells. We choose cremation over burial. We hire "funeral celebrants" to arrange everything from special poetry to servings of a loved one's favourite ice cream, or to release balloons at the service. And we shamelessly spill our guts — and sometimes gruesome details — online for public consumption.

Technology makes for some unusual, and ghoulish, memorials: For $35,000 (U.S.), a British art company reportedly offers to mix a loved one's DNA with a tree; a movie on Dutch TV raised the idea of webcams in coffins ("necrocams"); and bereaved parents on YouTube posted a montage of their premature, stillborn son, called "Our Baby Joe."

Online communities have debated what to do if a member — usually someone they never met in person — dies in the real world. Now, virtual gravesites are scattered across the Internet. The 3-D world of Second Life has a digital Japanese cemetery. A university student created MyDeathSpace.com, where people submit obituaries for deceased members of MySpace.com, another networking site dominated by teenagers.

For our own loved ones, we want the personal touch. For the celebrity death, over which we freely weep, we want the story — the unhappy ending, the random tragedy, the heroic sacrifice. We want to have our wailing moment, safe in a crowd, and move on.

But do these new forms make it easier to grieve? And do they allow a fully felt, meaningful experience?

"In our culture, we're given times when we are allowed to fall apart, but they are fairly orchestrated," says Ivan Emke, a professor at Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook who studies funeral practices. "If I am overwhelmed by emotion and I have to sit down and cry for a while, I can do it at a cancer event and that's okay. But I can't do it at Sobeys [the grocery store]. Sure, there are still spaces where we can grieve, but it has become more artificial."

'Conspicuous compassion'

Funeral practices change very suddenly, strongly subject as they are to cultural context. The Victorian practice of parading coffins through the streets with ostentatious ceremony ended when the casualties of the First World War made it seem distasteful. Families abandoned the tradition of home wakes once funeral directors arrived in town. Our unofficial gestures, once spontaneous, have become expected: You only have to Google the name of a teenager tragically killed to find a website in his or her honour. Other sites provide helpful directions on how to host a candlelight vigil, including reminders to contact the media.

These public shows of mourning — from the coloured ribbons on the lapel to the overwrought tears for strangers — have their critics. Displays such as basking Niagara Falls, say, in the colours of school-shooting site Virginia Tech can look downright tacky. Expressions of sympathy can sound over the top. One submission to Ms. de Sousa's site, sent by a visitor named Tom S a few days after the shooting, reads: "I never knew you. But I miss you more than anything else in the world."

In his short book Conspicuous Compassion, British writer Patrick West suggests harshly that public displays are often more about showing people that we care than they are about genuine emotion.

"We are given to ostentatious displays of empathy to a degree hitherto unknown," he writes.

This is a sign, to his thinking, of our broken social bonds, our desire for community, however superficial. He is a critic of lapel ribbons meant to advertise that the wearer's heart is in the right place, even if no real action or donation backs it up. "It is about feeling good, not doing good," he continues, "and illustrates not how altruistic we have become, but how selfish."

Certainly, we have an innate desire to do something when tragedy strikes — which means sending in the crisis counsellors, official policy dictates, though researchers debate whether they make any real difference.

George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist who studies resiliency at Columbia University, suggests that most people recover from a traumatic event on their own, with the help of friends. He cites a study of survivors sent to hospital after a car accident: The ones given an hour of crisis counselling that required them to rehash the events were more likely to be depressed and less likely to be driving and reported more pain three years later.

"We don't think about life and death very often in our culture," he says. "We keep it at bay. So when it does strike, we don't have very useful practices for dealing with it."

After the April shootings at Virginia Tech, Dr. Bonanno says, he was asked to speak at a candlelight vigil on his New York campus. He declined. "What would I say? 'Go home'? I don't see any point in holding memorials for strangers."

At the same time, he conceded, these reactions are driven by the media. "If you say, 'Here's a bad thing that happened — look, look,' then everybody looks."

'It was mine to do'

For John Perham, it's the expectation that everybody should be looking that makes his grief worse. Ten years ago, his 17-year-old son, Andrew, persuaded his mom to let him drive the car around the block. He has just got his licence that winter, but the roads were dry, and traffic was light on the streets of Ridgeway, Ont., a village of 2,000 near Fort Erie. Turning a corner, the car smashed into a tree and Andrew was killed.

By the next morning, the tree trunk had been swathed in flowers and candles. It was too much for Mr. Perham, who did not want to be reminded of how his son had died every day when he passed it. He quietly removed the flowers. "It was my grief," the retired beer-store clerk recalled this week. "It was mine to do." He didn't want the tree to become a shrine to his son: "That's what graveyards are for."

Even now, Mr. Perham has trouble driving down the main highway near Ridgeway, where several roadside memorials — some maintained by families for years — stand like ghostly reminders along the shoulder. "It's like having the bogeyman jump out from behind a corner at you every day," he says. He doesn't like feeling that someone else's grief is being imposed upon him. "I'll pick my own scab. You don't have to pick it for me."

The proliferation of roadside memorials has caused controversy — leading to bans because of safety concerns or neighbourhood wars over how tall or prominent they should be. These memorials have become the iconic image of a traffic accident for the nightly news and the subject of photo essays and scholarly books.

One Irish website lists the country's roadside shrines by year, including longitudes and latitudes for those who wish to pay a visit. After Grade 10 student Jane Creba was fatally shot on Yonge Street in Toronto on Boxing Day last year, flowers piled up on the sidewalk to the point that the ad-hoc memorial began forcing passing pedestrians into the street and had to be removed.

"It is a more creative and participatory approach to death," says Holly Everett, a folklore professor at Memorial University of Newfoundland who has written about the practice. "It is an attempt to rehabilitate a tragic space."

But it is also perhaps the best example of the motivation behind so many modern-day funeral rituals: an attempt at a raw and independent expression of grief outside the official, and often constricting, response of clerics and undertakers — one British researcher called it a "punk mourning culture."

No wonder, then, that teenage mourners are often the instigators of vigils, highway shrines and online memorials. It is one area of the grieving process they can control. There's no question that how we grieve is learned: Matthew Zilli, a Toronto Grade 11 student who created a Facebook page for his friend Manny Castillo, who died from injuries in a school rugby game in May, sounds like a psychologist when he talks about the community's need for "closure."

But there is true emotion wrapped up in even such seemingly ostentatious responses. Psychologists point out that teenagers, who feel immortal, often experience death for the first time through the passing of a peer, even if it is someone they don't know. People also go to vigils and memorials carrying the baggage of other griefs: If society endorses crying only in a group, as Prof. Emke suggests, then these public experiences become the only acceptable, available outlet.

Dr. Bonanno, while opposed to a vigil for strangers, says they can be healing when held within the community suffering most intimately from the loss. Matthew Zilli says simply, "It is easier to face it with people than locked up in a room by yourself."

Technology, while sometimes offering too much detail, can foster social ties that wouldn't exist otherwise. MyDeathSpace.com may be macabre by name, but it highlights teenagers killed in senseless car accidents and it offers a platform to discuss suicide, a topic mainstream media normally avoid. Pragmatically, it allows students far away to voice their sympathies. Similarly, for family and friends too distant to travel to services, funeral homes have starting filming funerals for online viewing.

And what is wrong, in the end, with strangers expressing gentle condolences?

Mihai Boianu is a Quebec student who did not know Ms. de Sousa and attends a different college, but he still left a polite note of sympathy on her tribute site. "I just wrote whatever came to mind," he says. "I was trying to walk in their shoes." He thought that if the family chose to read the comments, they might be heartened by how many people were thinking of them.

Keeping stories alive

It is human nature to be drawn to the stories of how others lived and died — we need them to give life some meaning, says Rini Cobbey, a communications professor at Gordon College in Massachusetts who studies celebrity death and public grief. "We are wired to look for drama," she says. It is that same need that feeds our desire to personalize eulogies, to understand the context behind tragedies, to feel sorrow for the Virginia Tech professor who had survived the Holocaust only to be killed by a gunman while protecting his students.

It may seem strange that the bereaved are willing to share so much of themselves in public forums — why would a mother announce her plans to visit her daughter's grave for any stranger to read?

But if our social networks are broken, as many cultural observers have declared, then these ad-hoc memorials can become places to rebuild them, when traditional spaces appear to fail us — a place where the mother can see that her lost daughter's friends still think of her, even on prom night, and where a community of support can continue when others have moved on with their lives.

The Anastasia de Sousa site is a way to keep her story alive, if only for a little longer. For in the end, our responses to death are led by a simple human wish: to remember, and to be remembered.

Erin Anderssen is a feature writer for The Globe and Mail.