The Virginia Senate is set to vote today on a bill that would make it easier for grieving families to access the Facebook page and other online accounts of deceased minors. The bill, The Washington Post reports, would make it easier for two central Virginia parents to perhaps find out why their son committed suicide.

Riley Rash found his son, Eric, facedown in a field not far from his Nottaway County farm in January 2011; Eric’s body was lying next to a shotgun. Since then, the Rashes have been struggling to learn why their son took his own life, and want to check his Facebook page for possible clues. The one problem: Facebook’s policy in the event of a user’s death does not provide for people reviewing the contents of their loved ones’ pages. The company will, with proof of death, deactivate a page or convert it into a virtual memorial wall, but Riley and Diane Rash are hoping Eric’s page might contain some answers about why he would end his own life.

Still, the Post reports, the answers might not be there:

The Rashes aren’t even sure whether their son’s Facebook account would shed light on his death. But they wanted to try, because nothing else explains what happened to Eric,who stood about 6 feet 2 and weighed 260 pounds.

“He had no desire to play football because he didn’t want to hurt anybody,” his father said.

The bill being deliberated in the Virginia Senate would change the state’s privacy laws to make it easier for parents and legal guardians to access the contents of a dead child’s online accounts. It would also get around the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, a 1986 law that allows children as young as 13 to sign terms of service with Internet companies, but obviously predates social networking platforms like Facebook by many years.

So far, five other states have passed laws making it easier for a dead person’s survivors to access their online profiles. The Post also reports that an estimated 30 million Facebook pages belong to deceased users.