The further we go into the digital age, the more questions we're presented with. And one of the most difficult to answer is: what happens to our digital lives when we die? For Amy Walsh, whose brother died last September, this question – at least in relation to social media – has been answered bluntly by Facebook: it gets deleted. Amy found out about it when she got a friend request from her deceased brother.

"It was unbelievable… I was crying, I was mad… it was just surreal."

Amy told Philip Boucher Hayes on Liveline that on the day of her late brother's birthday, she had intended to post a happy birthday message on his Facebook page when the friend request appeared. At first she thought someone was playing a particularly distasteful joke on her. But it appeared that the profile page – which had a picture of her late brother holding her son – was a fake profile, a bot looking to sign people up as friends. The fake page was reported to Facebook and removed, but it kept re-appearing. Meanwhile, Amy's brother's real Facebook page was still there. But then, Facebook deleted that too.

"His funeral was so amazing, there were pictures of it on Facebook."

Amy's brother travelled all over the world, posting photos and pictures to the social media site and she found logging onto Facebook and viewing his still-active profile a great comfort. She tried getting in touch with the social media giant, but found it very difficult to get a hold of a real person, or even find out if online forms led anywhere. This means that, although Amy is still awaiting a response from Facebook, she can't even be certain that they've received anything to respond to.

"I don't want to be able to get in to his page, I just want to be able to look at it, like I did before."

Amy believes that the fake pages that kept appearing may have led someone to report the real page by mistake. But without being able to contact Facebook, she has no way to find out what actually happened.

Liveline contacted Facebook and are awaiting a response.

You can listen back to the full interview here