The story of why-- in a crowded cafe no less, my laptop within view of complete strangers-- I spent an afternoon placing sparkly flower gifs on the virtual tombstones of my favorite dead musicians on a website called Find a Grave is, actually, a story about Judee Sill.

Sill was a California-born folk singer who released just two studio albums, though I didn't know a single thing about her life when I came across both LPs a few weeks ago at a record store. All I knew was that Daniel Rossen had recorded a sighingly gorgeous cover of her song "Waterfall" on a tribute album a couple of years ago; I had always just assumed that the person who wrote that melody and those lyrics had to be some kind of angel fallen accidentally to earth. I combed the front and back covers hoping to learn more about her, and what I saw was a woman who looked like what Millie from "Freaks and Geeks" would have looked like if she were an adult hippie: long, slightly beaky face, middle-parted hair hanging in twin braids, and a not-unfashionable yet earnest-seeming crucifix dangling by the breast pocket of her denim jacket. The pictures feel candid, unposed. She is not looking at you in any of them, and-- on 1973's Heart Food's cover, in particular-- she seems somewhere else, lost in her head's vivid rapture. That was the one I decided to buy.

Heart Food is a beautiful record-- the sort of clean, classical, Fibonacci-arcing and mathematically-provable version of beautiful that makes you feel inferior and grubby and inescapably human in its presence. (Sill gets lumped in with an interchangeable cast of plaintive-voiced folkies from the 60s and 70s, but a few critics have noted that her baroque arrangements conjure no one so much as Bach.) But there's something approachable about it too. It feels like spiritual music for not particularly spiritual people: You don't need to meet it halfway with any sort of faith or dogma or knowledge, you don't need to believe in anything but the strangely stirring power of the sound itself. There's a song called "The Kiss" that has a melody so crystalline and palliative that, if you could drink it, it would probably both cure leprosy and make you accidentally fall in love with the next person you see. And "The Donor" is an eight-minute finale of such blazing power that you sort of just sit there after it's over, unsure about what you've just experienced, full of questions about the kind of person who could successfully shut out the shitiness of the world and make music music that is so thoroughly, faithfully, unapologetically beautiful. So, to Wiki you go.

Have you ever loaded a Wikipedia page wanting to believe that the obscure folk singer or nuclear physicist or game show host you're looking up is still alive and has lived a happy, fulfilling, painless life-- and then the basic facts of their biography land on your gut like an anvil? Here is the first thing I saw on Judee Sill's page: "Died: November 23, 1979 (aged 35)." And then: "The first artist signed to David Geffen's Asylum label, she released two albums, then worked briefly as a cartoonist before dying of drug abuse in 1979." To me, the cruelest thing about this sentence was that "drug abuse" was hyperlinked to its own extensive and authoritative Wiki, as if all the varying, personal horrors contained in that phrase could be broken neatly into sections, tagged with proper citation, and explained.

Sill's life was like something out of a cautionary after-school special: heroin, prostitution, bank robbery, jail-time. Intermittent homelessness ("I was living in a '55 Cadillac with five people at the time, sleeping in shifts," she reminisces during some light banter on her Live in London album before adding, with characteristic resiliency, "It was in the summer, it wasn't so bad. It had air conditioning in the car.") She hurt her back in a car accident a little while after she was dropped from Geffen, and since her doctors knew her history and wouldn't prescribe her painkillers, she remained in chronic pain until she died. Her death itself is a bit of a mystery. "The Los Angeles coroner ruled Sill's death a suicide," according to a 2006 article in The Washington Post, "but those who knew her better have always contended that the 'note' found near her body-- a meditation on rapture, the hereafter and the innate mystery of life-- may just have been part of a diary entry or, perhaps, another one of her haunted, haunting songs beginning to take shape."

It was in this state of mind-- trying to reconcile how someone who'd known such pain could still find the strength to sing like a lamb-- that I saw a link at the bottom of the page: "Judee Sill at Find a Grave."

There is a place a friend of mine refers to as "the other internet," where the streamlined, homogenized design of Facebook never caught on. Where people ramble on to their heart's content, ungoverned by the laws of 140-character concision. Where "GIF" still means what it meant in 1998; where the "Ally McBeal" baby probably still dances, blissfully uninterrupted for all of eternity. Find a Grave, a website that bills itself as "a virtual cemetery experience," is located deep within this realm. But do not let its GeoCities-caliber aesthetic fool you: This is a well-trafficked piece of internet real estate. There is (naturally) a hit counter on the main page, and it boasts about 14 million page views per day.

Back in 1995, James Tipton, was just a guy who "could not find an existing site that catered to his hobby of visiting the graves of famous people," and decided to take matters into his own hands. Find a Grave began as an online database that hosted photographs of famous graves, but it's since expanded (exponentially, thanks to a dedicated staff of tombstone photographers: 93 million graves and counting) to hosting photos of non-famous graves. Today, most of its traffic comes from people looking for friends and family members' burial sites-- some of which they'd never be able to visit in person. It's a commendable service, but coming to the site through Sill's memorial page, I was most intrigued by the celebrity pages, and seeing what sort of messages and GIFs their fans had posted.

On Sill's HTML tombstone, there is a short bio, a photo of her looking very happy in a canary-yellow tunic, and a rather clinical indication ("Burial: Cremated") that her ashes have been scattered across the Pacific. There are also 43 notes and clip-art style "virtual flowers," left by members of the site. The notes range from sweet to bizarre and, at that moment, as I was trying to process the sad details of her death 33 years late, they were exactly what I wanted to read. There are missives from diehards ("With devotion from a loyal fan who loved your music then and now. I saw your first concert in April 1971 at Doug Weston's Troubadour in West Hollywood") and a few from random Find a Grave users just passing through ("I'm sorry I don't know your music, I love the music of the 60s. You sound like an interesting lady, rest where no tears fall…"), but most of them have one thing in common. They all address Sill-- the woman who, on her record covers, seemed too lost in her own joy or pain to even notice you there-- in this familiar tone, like they are talking right to her.

There's something unexpectedly comforting about

the fact that somewhere in the wilderness of the internet,

grief goes on long after the #RIP trending topics have faded.

As you can probably imagine, there are some truly bizarre and downright disturbing things about any given Find a Grave experience. For example, I saw on a few different memorial sites a rippling, rainbow GIF that read, in a Comic Sans-esque font, "In memory of a Victim of Suicide." There is also a poll at the bottom of each celebrity's memorial page, which asks "How famous was this person?" and lets you rate them on a scale of one to five stars. (For context: Adam Yauch is a 4.2. Abraham Lincoln an impressive 4.9.) And maybe worst of all was the image of a frowny sunflower carrying the message: "The Virtual Flowers feature has been turned off for this memorial because it was being continually misused." Thinking about whatever people were saying on Biggie and Tupac's pages to warrant this message makes me lose one more sliver of faith in humanity.

But once (or, more likely, if) you can get past all the strangeness and despair, there's something unexpectedly comforting about these memorials-- about the fact that somewhere in the wilderness of the internet, grief goes on long after the #RIP trending topics have faded. I've found the kneejerk motions of writing a timely Twitter obit to be a little queasy; I can remember, as the hashtagged memorials poured through my feed following Broadcast frontwoman Trish Keenan's sudden passing in 2011, I felt impelled to join in but could merely muster a string of clichés that didn't even hint at what Keenan's music meant to me.

"On Twitter, grief is just another meme," Jewcy's Jacob Silverman wrote last summer, commenting on some of the patterns he saw across his social networks the week that Adam Yauch died. "When a celebrity dies, we are all prompted to author our own mini-memoirs." In July, right after Donna Summer's death, Monica Hesse came to a similar conclusion in a Washington Post article called "Tweet It and Weep", which defined digital grief as a superficial combination of "sadness" and "performance art." "Online," she concluded, "grief over dead celebrities is about us."

And the messages left on Find a Grave's pages are, in Silverman's words, mini-memoirs. But they don't feel condemnably narcissistic to me. They're joyful and sad and silly and heartbreaking. They humanize the musicians as much as they do the people who wrote them.

To singer-songwriter Tim Hardin, who wrestled all his life with the burden of his talent: "You were in my creative writing class at South Eugene High in 1959. You always had such promise and always seemed to 'blow it,' but that is not for me to judge."

To Alex Chilton, on the enduring, private ripples of a hit song he always resented: "About 10 years ago, I wrote a letter to an old friend who lived out of state. He took an airplane to see me. Your song, 'The Letter' has been our song ever since. We've been very happily married almost 8 years now."

Some heartfelt bromance for MCA: "MAN I MISS U BUDDY. BRASS MONKEY 4 LIFE! MY BELL I GOT THE ILL COMMUNICATION. NO SLEEP TILL BROOKLYN!!!!!!!!! --KRAZY JOE"

And on Janis Joplin's page, clip art of a red, white, and blue rose accompanied by a rightfully exclamatory caption: "We made love!"

Fandom has always been this interplay between the public and private, between the self-conscious broadcasts of band t-shirts and the quiet, devotional headphone moments. And whatever a "virtual cemetery experience" is, Find a Grave's memorial pages replicate that duality; millions of page views a day, and yet you get the eerie sense you're the first person who's been there in months. So, while clicking through the virtual headstones, I'm suddenly compelled to do something that seemed stupid and embarrassing 15 minutes ago: I make an account on Find a Grave. I leave a rose for Janis. A beer for D. Boon. For Left Eye, some music notes, but only because there wasn't a condom eye patch in this particular collection of clip art. By the time I get to Sill, I'm comfortable enough with this whole ridiculous exercise to leave a note. Her own words, paraphrased to fit the occasion:

"I know you would have not only been amazed that this site exists," someone wrote to Joplin, "But you would be laughing your head off." I think Sill, too, would have been delighted at the lurid, glittering weirdness of it all-- the internet's gaudy, rapturous take on the hereafter. "Judee Sill has now triumphed beyond the grave," wrote the Post's Tim Page on the occasion of her 2006 reissues, "As she always believed she would." He was talking about her records, of course. But you should have seen the flowers.