Death Announcement Status Update

grieving in the age of social media

Photo by Intricate Explorer on Unsplash

Reader’s note: this week marks the first anniversary of my brother’s death. In the wake of it, I wrote this short essay about what it felt like to grieve on social media. Tonally, it’s a little different from what I usually write here, but given our look at attention and social media this month, I thought it might be of interest.

I found out my brother was missing on Facebook Messenger. Instant annoyance—how many times did my brothers and I have to explain Millennial phone etiquette to our parents? It seemed they would never grasp when to call versus message. I didn’t take the disappearance seriously. There had been false alarms before.

I hadn’t planned to post about Karl being missing, but our youngest brother had already put up a Facebook post, and our dad had shared it, so this must be what they thought was best. Two weeks previously, I’d shared a friend’s post about her missing niece, including her height, weight, last known location, and a photo of her flashing a peace sign on some suburban street. And it had worked! Or something had worked—unclear. The post was later amended with a short note that she’d been found.

I shared my youngest brother’s post, which asked for help from folks in the area of Kalispell, Montana, in locating our middle brother, Karl, who’d been missing for almost 48 hours. I imagined high school friends nudging their acquaintances in the area, maybe some information about where he could’ve turned up when he disappeared that Saturday night. But the post was shared mainly by my friends on the west coast. Friends of these friends commented with well wishes or sent “care” hearts. This was public information; we’d asked for it to be shared. Still, it was jarring to see strangers write things like “praying for the family.” They had never met our family.

When my dad called later that night, I knew Karl was dead before I picked up the phone. The call itself was surreal—my father’s voice breaking, my body leaden with dread. The very air seemed to thicken. Adrenaline spiked then plummeted, my body hardening into dull wood, rigor mortis of the spirit.

Meanwhile, the post about Karl being missing continued to circulate, to generate shares, comments, tags, and notifications. I wanted to stop it, to break some kind of emergency glass and have everyone freeze. But first we needed to notify relatives and close friends individually, even as I was unsure who of Karl’s Facebook friends he was still in touch with. No one wants to find out their bestie died while scrolling memes.

Once all the calls we could think of had been made, it was time to tell the rest of Facebook. What do you say about such a thing? Generally, my posts were snarky and self-effacing; I dreaded the earnest bluntness of such an announcement, the bare vulnerability of sharing this very real thing publicly. But, knowing the agony of not knowing, it felt important to be timely. I posted that Karl had been found, that he was dead, and that we missed him. I thanked people for their prayers.

People started commenting on the death announcement, sending more care hearts. Meanwhile other people were still replying to the previous post. For them, Karl was still alive, still out there somewhere, relying on their prayers, their spurious police connections, or the knowledge of missing persons cases they’d gleaned from watching Dateline.

I logged off, went into the woods, and still, every time I came back into range, a cascade of notifications. It felt so intrusive. I needed my phone for mundanities like the ETA of my child’s school bus or to tell me when our litter robot needed cleaning. But now, at all hours, notifications chimed: your brother is dead, dead, dead.

Alone in my house, I started reading about Irish Wakes and Victorian mourning periods: six months of wearing black and foregoing social obligations to mourn a sibling. I donned black and felt Victorian as I sat at my writing desk to finally reply to all the messages. It was the same conversation, over and over: I’m up and down. Yes, it’s awful. 37 is so young. Everyone wanted to know what they can do from so far away. Can I send you a gift card? Money for the funeral? Make a donation? Where should I donate to? What would you like? What do you need? They were quick to offer money, to do the online shopping version of support. Sometimes they offered to Facetime, even people I hadn’t spoken to in a decade. “I’m here for you.” But they weren’t here, they were there. When did we decide to conflate Facetime with being “here”?

All this is not to point fingers, to give you a listicle “Top Ten Things Not to Say to a Grieving Person.” I used to read such things and fret. Now I know there are no good words. No one knew what to say. Neither did I. The point wasn’t the information I gave them; the point was them asking. Still, I was tired of repeating myself. It began to feel like I was performing grief rather than grieving—that others needed me to be sad so they could comfort me.

If we’d been face to face, you could’ve sat at my kitchen table while I loaded the dishwasher like it was a normal Wednesday. You could’ve seen, for yourself, how I was. But we weren’t looking at each other, we were looking into separate screens. Into this technological abyss, people can only project themselves, each imagining how they would feel. Their deep empathy resulted in them not seeing me at all.

Or maybe it’s my fault no one seemed to understand. Maybe I was too reticent in my sharing. But on the public stage of social media, where all relationships are weighted with equal intimacy, it felt too much like shouting my emotions into a bullhorn: “MY BROTHER IS DEAD AND I AM PISSED OFF.”

For reasons too complicated and depressing to get into, my family decided not to hold a funeral. This frustrated me—I craved proximity. Five hundred miles removed from family; I was an island of grief in a sea of normalcy.

What I wanted was to wash my brother’s body, dress him in white, to watch over him at night, to pray by candlelight that, finally, he was at peace. I wanted to keen as he was gently lowered into the grave. I wanted to weep into a handkerchief and scatter crumbs of clay soil like raindrops on his shiny coffin. Instead I attended a meeting with the funeral director via video chat while standing in my kitchen. I hadn’t understood it would be a video call; I answered sweaty in my sports bra, gulping a large glass of water. Later my family DMed me photos of urns.

What I wanted was time and place, the finitude of the real world. I longed to retrace Karl’s final footsteps in the snow, to lie down in the spot where he died and know what he knew and feel what he felt. Failing that, there was Google Maps, Wikipedia, and an ice fishing site called LakeMonster.com which informed me that, on that fateful night, the ice on Echo Lake was eight inches thick.

I tried to convince myself that accumulating all these little online facts went some way towards understanding. (I will never understand.) I wanted to touch the lake, to thank the water for holding him when I could not.