ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on ethnographic research in the virtual, 3D social world of Second Life. Identities and social relationships are constructed through avatars in social and game worlds that are part of this larger, complex story of digital life and death, rituals of mourning and memorialisation, and the fragile futures of online sites and virtual worlds. The chapter focuses on the forum data and selected interviews on the difficulty of mourning losses that is not resolved because there is no symbolic act or marker of a social death. The name Second Life provokes the ordering categories as a first and second life and by extension a first and second death. Community forum posts also engages the veracity of claims to real biological death as many people fake their second life death by faking their real-life death. Second life social deaths can remain undiscovered, or discovered in delayed and uneven temporalities.
