Your Aging Parents

A friend's mother adored gardening and poetry. So her family decided to engrave her bronze gravestone with the final words in William Wadsworth's "Daffodils": "And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils."

At 48, Anna Marie Laurence and her husband, Dan, are parenting her 16-year-old daughter, her 20-year-old son — and her 77-year-old mom. "Trying to balance taking care of kids at home and taking care of a parent — that's been a little bit of a challenge," she says.

When her mother died, one pal simply posted two lovely photographs of her on Facebook. By contrast, another friend did not note her mom's death on her page and, for months, stopped using the social-networking site. To her, it suddenly seemed too frivolous.

In the old days, Americans paid for short, not-so-personal obituaries in the local newspaper. They still can, of course, but they can also decide whether to publicly memorialize a loved one on Facebook.