One part of mourning and the grieving process that sometimes gets overlooked is the social aspect, how people navigate the complicated customs, mores, and traditions we associate with death and funerals, while also trying to find time to personally grieve. There are two clearly-defined sides of grieving, the public and the private, the outward and the inward. We expect a grieving family to behave a certain way at the funeral, at the memorial service, in the immediate days afterward. It can be hard to find time to mourn on one’s own, to work to begin the difficult process of grief and letting go.
Social media complicates all that even more. Take Facebook. When someone with an account dies, it’s pretty common for people to post goodbye messages on his/her wall, not anything too in depth, just something to serve as an outlet for their personal grieving process. Now, I want to stress that this is not necessarily a good or a bad thing, just a complicating factor. For one thing, the nature of social media is public. By posting these personal messages on a public social networking site, people are blurring the boundaries between the private and public sides of grieving. They are opening up their mourning to others, showing them how they are feeling and what they are going through. At least, in theory that’s what they’re doing. In reality, everything people post on Facebook (for the most part) is edited and created with a specific lens in mind. Are people posting for themselves, or for other Facebook users? Not to be too cynical, but I would find it hard to believe that there isn’t a certain percentage of people who spend a lot of time crafting their post to hit just the right chords, to get just the right amount of likes and comments.
Part of this is natural, people like to make good impressions, there’s nothing wrong with that. Yet doesn’t it feel a little…off? We like to think of grieving as an intensely personal experience, something raw and honest, unique to each person. So if someone begins to manufacture or reframe their grief, it feels a bit like cheating, like they’re commercializing something sacred. Maybe I’m just being too emotional or naive here, but at least for me, my grief is not easily put into words, or summarized with a few pithy lines, a couple emojis, and a picture of my dead friend smiling. I’m being overly harsh, but you get my point. Facebook, along with other social media sites, complicate the grieving process, force the public and private sides to merge in new and often uncomfortable ways. As is typically the case, technology continues to surge ahead, while culture struggles to catch up.