The Voice of your Pain

This article is about the way that social media has changed how people grieve. It details several different programs that people have started and talks about the changing discussion and process of grief in the digital age. Some sites host essays on loss. Others catalog the pictures that people take at funerals, often of themselves. There is a web series where a mortician answers questions about death and dying, removing the some of the mysteries.

When my mom died, my online contact was fairly limited. I mostly just hung out at Sims forums and read some pop culture stuff, so I didn't mourn the loss of her in any kind of public way. It was a very private and internal thing. It still is, really. From time to time, I talk to people about it and I do discuss it here in the blog, but for the most part, coming to terms with my mother's death has been a private matter.

When my grandmother was will and on her way to dying, my aunt and uncle encouraged me to join Facebook. The process of her last days and how we experienced them was very much in the social forum. A lot of my family lives far away and visiting my grandmother wasn't possible in many cases. They wanted updates about her condition, details about how she was fairing, and of course, when she passed, they wanted to know.

My grieving experience over my grandmother was very public. I wrote about it. I messaged people about it. I wrote emails about it and discussed it many times online. Where my grieving over my mother is a very internal thing, my grief over my grandmother is quite open. I have a far easier time talking about it, even though the process of losing her was far more emotionally catastrophic because I was right next to her and holding her hand when it happened.

I think one of the main reasons I am able to be more open about Grandma's death is because even as it was happening, I was in a position to where I HAD to talk about it. People would ask me online about what was going on and of course I would tell them. How could I not? They didn't mean me any harm. They just wanted to know what was going on in the last days of this woman they cared about. This kind of openness can be rough in the moment, but on reflection, I think it helped me to accept her death and come to terms with the fact of it in ways that, even now, I haven't really processed with my mom.

Some people might not feel that being told in a FB comment that they are sorry for your loss holds any meaning. Perhaps for some people, that's even true. However, for me, it does hold meaning. It holds a lot of meaning. I believe as more and more people accept and welcome words typed at them as being an important thing, shared grief on social media could become a wonderful tool of healing.