Mourners Find Comfort in Cyberspace

Since his girlfriend died in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, Anthony Worster has found a way to grieve daily with others who lost loved ones in the disaster and ease the despair that has consumed him for more than 10 weeks.

Three, four, sometimes five times a day, Worster accesses the “TWA Flight 800 Message Board” on the World Wide Web to mourn with families and friends of other victims. In this cyberspace support group, the bereaved post prayers and wistful poems, eulogize the dead, exchange information on the crash probe and read condolences from well-wishers around the world.

Worster, 31, a paralegal who lives in Orono, Maine, said in an interview that he turns to the message board during those moments when “I feel like I am going to erupt.” In a recent posting, he pined for his girlfriend and described the wrenching ordeal of trying to cope with her death:

It was another sleepless night last night eventually giving way to dawn

Even when I do sleep it still hurts

Oh God I miss you so much

My family and friends tell me I have to find some closure

Reality says yes but my heart cries no

What I would give to see one more smile one more chance to hold you in my arms.

“It’s therapeutic because I can vent,” Worster said. The electronic message board “makes you realize you are not alone in the world, that other people are going through this as well. It is sort of a second family to me. I don’t know what I would do without it.”

Web sites like the Flight 800 one are part of a growing number of support-oriented services springing up on the Internet. There are online suicide hotlines and pages for groups like parents whose babies have died of sudden infant death syndrome and those with AIDS.

Funerals and memorial services have been held in cyberspace, and memorial sites on the Internet allow people to grieve using their keyboards. The Web’s sprawling reach has been particularly useful in the Flight 800 case because the 230 people killed in the July 17 crash off the Long Island coast were a geographically diverse group. The Web has enabled victims’ relatives and friends throughout the United States to commiserate among themselves and with counterparts in other countries, such as France, where about 50 of the people aboard the Paris-bound plane lived.

“The Internet is becoming a new dimension, a new realm where the self-help movement can blossom,” said John Suler, a clinical psychologist and professor at Rider College in Lawrenceville, N.J., who specializes in group behavior on the Internet. “Pages like this follow a lot of the principles of group dynamics, but in a virtual medium in the sense there is no face-to-face encounter. It also stretches the boundaries of time. For the group to survive, you don’t have to all be at the same place at the same time.”

Although the Flight 800 page cannot duplicate an actual support group meeting or memorial service, those who visit the page say that they are comforted by knowing it is available around the clock and that messages remain there indefinitely.

“If I wake up grieving at 5 in the morning and can’t get back to sleep, I can read sentiments posted on the page or leave a message of my own, crystallize some of my thoughts and not wake someone else,” said Jeff Bohlin, whose daughter, Michelle, was one of 16 high school students from Montoursville, Pa., killed in the crash.

From his Plainview, N.Y., office on the north shore of Long Island, Fred Abelman, 23, set up the site to provide a forum for people distraught over the crash to express their feelings and help them come to terms with the tragedy. “It was a chance to assist those in need and not get in the way of investigators,” he said.

Since it was put up several days after the disaster, the message board--which can be found using the Internet address:

https://www.nystate.com/ msgboard or search engines and links on news sites such as CNN’s Web page--has been accessed 6,600 times and received more than 400 postings.

“I think for some people this is an easier way to express themselves because when they are deep in grief they may not be able to pick up the phone and call somebody,” Abelman said. “The board is also appealing because it is not intrusive. In a tragedy like this, you may not want to answer the phone and be bothered. But in this case, you are coming to read the information.”

The site’s home page, which has been accessed more than 12,300 times, also contains a Flight 800 passenger list and links to agencies investigating the crash, including the FBI and the Navy. There are also links to essays and poems on the disaster and a memorial page for the Montoursville students.

The message board has been so popular that Abelman is setting up a chat room that will enable those affected by the disaster to have live online discussions. When Abelman assured those using the board that he had no plans to remove it, one person wrote back, “That makes my day. . . . You have made our lives a little easier and I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. . . . I will never forget it.”