When I woke up this morning, both Facebook and Twitter were full - as they are every few months - with the shock of an unexpected death. In February, it was Philip Seymour Hoffman; today it was Robin Williams. People, as they do, posted a smattering of famous clips from Youtube. These usually tend toward the sentimental. In the case of Williams, they were mostly his best monologues from “Dead Poets Society” and “Good Will Hunting.” There’s always a strange disjunction between these clips and reality. They tend to be life affirming clips, about loneliness being a means to self discovery or pain being worth the price in the end - and yet the reality is, this person just died because they were unable to heed, or believe, the advice they’re espousing in these clips. It’s the same dichotomy that exists when reading (or listening to) David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water.” It’s a beautiful speech about enduring the crushing tedium and despair of daily life … by a man who booked his own ticket out of that daily despair and tedium.

(This didn’t stop me from joining in, however. I posted the scene from “Good Will Hunting” when Williams’ character recounts missing the famous Game 6 of the 1975 World Series to buy his future wife a beer. It appeals to both my nostalgia for baseball and women.)

When Seymour Hoffman died this winter, and the same smattering of life affirming videos popped up, a friend and I discussed the peculiarity of this communal mourning.

“It seems crass,” the friend said. “It’s so superficial, like you can possibly share in the real pain of their families, or like they meant something to you in the same way that a friend means something to you. It’s equating their deaths with the picture you posted last night of the peach cobbler you made for dessert, or last week’s drunken shitshow.”

This posed a few questions. First, can we be impacted by public figures - actors, comedians, writers, musicians - in the same way that friends impact us? In my opinion, this isn’t really worth discussing because the answer is so obvious. Anyone who has read a book that spoke directly to them, or fallen in love over a song, knows that the answer is yes, absolutely. Is it a bit different than friend love or romantic love? Sure. It’s based on a lot more projection, but the truth is, friend love and romantic love are based on a lot more projection than we’d like to admit, too. And besides: it’s likely that, over the course of a lifetime, we’ll spend more years with our favorite artists’ creations than with most of our lovers.

The second question is thornier. Is it crass to go from drunken revelry to mourning a public figure to then, a day later, posting about how badly you need a beach day? Does it somehow lessen the real pain of losing a close loved one? Is it yet another symptom of the passivity that Facebook and Twitter have made rampant; a passivity that passes off hashtags as protest and posting links to documentaries as activism; the same passivity that has led to the rampant, world-wide domination of consumerism, which is, in turn, destroying our planet?

In this case, I don't think so. Facebook and Twitter have become weird amalgams between our "best" selves and vane outlets for mundane pettiness. It's rare that we talk about things of consequence. We are either happy all the time or venting about boredom. Rarely are we vulnerable.

On one hand, the point of such posts is that death should share space with peach cobbler and beach days and frustrations about traffic. It should because it can strike at anyone of those times. Loss is an irrevocable part of life - maybe even the biggest - though you would rarely know it from a daily perusal of Facebook. There’s little room on our social media for the truly painful, real aspects of life - the failure and depression, the addiction and heart break.

There are, I think, a few reasons for this. One is that we’re all trying to put our best selves forward online. We have employers to appease, friends to impress, exes to make jealous. Sharing our weak and human moments of depression and desperation undercut one of the main narratives we are trying to put forth - and that narrative is, my life is awesome all the time.

The other reasons is that when others do break through this sort of online fourth wall and share their moments of depression and neediness, it makes us (or at least me) deeply uncomfortable. Facebook, Twitter - these are the places we go to be distracted or to seek solidarity in our boredom and frustration. To suddenly be confronted by real, unsightly feelings brings us back to what we’re trying to escape: the abandonment of our dreams, the hollowness of the "American" dream, the failure of our relationships, the basic loneliness of being human.

The death of a public figure is then an outlet for these rawer emotions. They’re still being shared from a remove, but it’s better than not sharing them at all. If we think of Facebook or Twitter as the centers of a much larger community - an extension of the diner in the eponymous film or the bar in a show like “Cheers” - then these fleeting reminisces are exactly like the moments in our conversations when we briefly stop talking about ourselves and tell a story or anecdote about a friend who has passed or moved on. Yes, it’s brief. Yes, it’s passive. Yes, we’ll forget it in two days time when we’re back focusing on our breakup or our boring job, but this is just how we are as humans.

At the same time, sharing these stories can remind us, even fleetingly, to call up the people we love and let them know that we’re thinking of them. And it’s through these stories that we stay alive, in some small way, after we’ve passed. Facebook and Twitter are as good as any diner or café for telling the stories, for keeping alive friends who have passed too soon.

One of the ways, in fact, that Facebook and Twitter are actually preferable to the flesh and blood friends in a diner is that they allow the whole chorus to join in the reminiscing. It’s like the entire diner or bar has suddenly joined in:

“Yeah, I remember Robin. Watching ‘Good Will Hunting,’ man, that shit got me through my first breakup. ”

“Oh man, let me tell you about this one time when Philip did something truly memorable.”

Everyone has a story to share. In such moments, we’re reminded of how much we have in common with one another - how the same things resonate in most of us.

Of course, as is true of so many tortured deaths, I can’t help wondering what would’ve happened if Robin Williams or Philip Seymour Hoffman had known how loved they were, how impactful their lives had been, before they descended into depression or addiction.

This, above all, is what makes this communal mourning valuable. This form of storytelling is a reminder to all of us: speak while you still have time. Let those you love know what they’ve meant to you. As you watch clips from “Good Will Hunting” and “Dead Poets Society,” don’t be afraid of sentiment. As these clips remind us, at the end of our lives, it’s the times when we dared to speak honestly, sentiment be damned, for which we’re remembered.