from Kirstyn
The day before my dad died, some little shit preemptively killed him off on Facebook. He wrote ‘RIP Mr Smith’ which prompted my Mum’s friend to call us in a panic and, after that, everyone knew he was dead before he’d even died. People share too much on social media, but for every website dedicated to calling people out on their narcissism there are millions of people who log in and find out what’s going on in the world before turning to traditional news sites. As such, social media is where we first hear about tragedies; deaths and war and so on, so it’s natural to express how we feel about these events in the same medium. In this article, Dr Pamela Rutledge, Director of the Media Psychology Research Centre says social media allows ‘more people to be involved in the grieving process without imposing on immediate friends and family’. There are a number of fine lines in Facebook statuses, veering from that empty status bar off in different directions: attention seeking, fishing for sympathy, sharing too much personal drama, humblebragging, updating far-off friends. But for me, a post about my situation helped make things so much easier. Friendship in modern days is curious; half-friends who would have faded from your life pre-internet - despite there being no hard feelings - are kept up-to-date. How do you begin to start sharing that kind of news with people you once knew who are now distant shadows? I phoned a handful of close friends and hoped that Facebook and word of mouth would do the rest. The anonymity of social media is also in favour of the receivers of sad news. I shared a Facebook status my old school posted about my Dad, who had taught there for 35 years. Friends and acquaintances and near-strangers, the majority of whom had never met my Dad, responded with genuinely kind words. It’s a new take on an old way of responding to tragedy. The sentiments were the same, but there were exclamation marks and over-sentimentality and black lines and curves on a white screen saying more than anybody said in person. The Atlantic wrote a really good piece about modern grief, in particular talking about the Facebook reactions to the Haiti earthquake in 2010, saying: ‘Though we may wonder why someone would use [...] a sad face emoticon when reflecting on this tragedy, there is someone awful and brutally humanizing about it all. You get the sense that this is what tragedy look like and this is how our hearts actually respond.’ Before the internet, says The Atlantic, ‘you had to go knock on your neighbor’s door when something was wrong, but not very many of us did it because we didn’t know what to say. We were just not equipped.’ While this may be true, that’s not to say that grief was private news for inside voices. In 2003, a few weeks after my Grandpa died, my Mum and Aunt received a letter in old-man cursive from a friend of his. In the letter, he remarked, self-deprecatingly, that they probably wouldn’t know who he was (they did), but he still wanted to pass on his good wishes and fond memories of Bill. His words were heartbreaking in their sincerity and I wish I knew who he was. The only differences between then and now is such good wishes don’t take weeks to arrive and we don’t worry the receiver will have forgotten us - because our big old profile picture is right next to the message. The distance social media affords means that there’s the opportunity to reach out in a way that’s less awkward than that dull door knock. The sentiment isn’t necessarily less sincere. Recently, Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg has been speaking out about posting a deeply personal message on Facebook after her husband died unexpectedly in May. She says: ‘People started talking to me more openly. And even strangers, because I'm not the only person who experienced loss this year or in previous years.’ Death is the last taboo, both online and in person. This is unhelpful, harmful even, for those who desperately need to talk, so anything that encourages discussion, conversation or acknowledgement of this world-wreck can only be a good thing. It’s nearly a year since my Dad died and his death is the one thing that’s taking up all of my thoughts, rattling around my mindspace like a penny in a pie dish. It’s what I want to talk about. On the original post that I shared, there were 451 likes, 200 comments and 54 shares - with not a single negative word in there. I am still as proud of him as I was a when I read it through blurry eyes a year ago. If that’s not worth sharing, I don’t know what is.
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