Since Oliver Sacks’ essay foreshadowing his death circulated yesterday, an emotional response has begun in my social media circles, a tone of distressed alarm and denial from his younger readers. It’s an unusual thing to see, I had thought, that the death of a public figure is predicted for us so acutely, let alone its articulation from the individual himself.
In most cases, family and friends of the deceased will want to make this person’s death a private affair, as is their right. However, for those of us “in the audience” who live at a greater distance, we are struck with a thirst for detail in the disclosure of a celebrity death. Not only are we accustomed to their life being shared with us, but knowledge and understanding in grieving paves the way to acceptance: always a hurdle to overcome, but especially so with the figure’s death likely to be a shock to us.
What does it mean to us for a person’s dying to be shared by their own voice? From what I know, this is an extremely rare experience for social media users. In response to Sacks, we are shocked, vulnerable, scared, sad, in denial. Typically known features of grief, which were initially defined for the terminally ill in grieving the end of their own life, but eventually taken on by the parties left behind.
Why are we so uncomfortable talking about grief?
When I was 15, I experienced significant, life-changing grief for the first time, and I was the first of my friends. I had no well-formed faculties by which to discuss my grief, and the isolation was rough. I barely uttered a word about my feelings. Nine years later, my father died, and even then, my experience was not widely shared by my peers and it was still difficult to talk about. Four years on, I see things starting to change – but our twenties and thirties combined are a time where things can be so very mixed. Many of my friends haven’t yet experienced the death of a grandparent, some are yet to attended a funeral in their lifetime – but a handful of us know very precisely the pain grief brings. In such an eclectic range of adult experiences, talking about grief is difficult – naturally. I’ve myself made comparison to announcing my history with grief as “coming out”: you don’t make the announcement once, but every time you develop a close relationship with someone, every time you may be sprung by a question from a stranger, you need to dig up your feelings and truths again and again, potentially to an awkward reaction. And so I tend to do so with my fourth glass of wine in hand – or, possibly more healthily, I share a photo or a sentimental note on social media.
Displays of grief via social media I’ve come to know can be seen as distasteful, crass, inelegant. Collective mourning last year for Robin Williams was criticised as unseemly: “You have to imagine that the people who are truly grieving over said individual’s death do not, in those first minutes, think to take to their Twitter accounts”, wrote Dylan Byers. And why is that?
As users, we’d like to think our experience of social media is selective: we follow our friends, colleagues, the brands and organisations we feel invested in, news outlets we trust, excluding from our choices the noises we don’t like to hear. Our time spent on these platforms is executed by private use. We participate together, but as individuals. We browse content we’ve subscribed to while traveling, working, procrastinating, when we are looking for something to do. In the event of another user’s post about their own grief, we are affronted by this contemplation of death. While we collectively commiserate the passing of a public figure, an individual’s own display of grieving someone intimately can appear indulgent and inappropriate. To put it more bluntly, a person’s own open wound for all to see – combined with the social media conventions of exhibitionism – can easily be seen to be bad form.
Where do our conversations about grief belong?
It is a problem of social media that it feeds a desire for immediate gratification and narcissism. If many of our gestures on social media exhibitionist acts, expressions of pain are considered the same and an undesirable contribution to the space. In its early contexts, social media was not the appropriate forum to talk about death, unhappiness, illness or break-ups – but as social media is increasingly integrated with the practical every day experience, need these unwritten rules still apply?
Since my father died in 2011, I’ve come to care less and less about this ambiguous etiquette. The day my father died, I changed my Facebook profile picture to a photo of he and I, taken when I was a baby, held up on his shoulders. While things may be more flexible now, this raised a few eyebrows at the time. I was told by one person, “I respect your choice to do that but I wouldn’t have done the same”, as though this were a crass act on my part. I thought about this for some time, and came to the conclusion: if I am representing myself on social media, how can I show myself in any other way than what is most devastatingly true to me at this time?
Talking about grief is missing from our experience, not just in the digital sphere. For those of us who have not yet experienced the death of someone close to us, I’ve witnessed time and time again a social paralysis when faced in conversation with the cold, hard, inflexible truth of somebody’s death and the people who loved them: there’s almost always an internal process that looks a lot like, “what the fuck do I say?”
(My suggestion, if you’re looking for it? Stay calm. It’s going to be fine.)
Let’s set aside our concerns for the sadder, more indulgent side of social media – such as Selfies at Funerals – and consider how heavily social media has become integrated with our cultural tone. There is benefit here to making waves and discussing grief with open acceptance and understanding.
