#194: On grief and posting through it
Good morning and welcome back to Dear Baby!
Today I’m answering a question from a reader who just lost their dad and is embarrassed to find themselves preoccupied with whether to post about it on Instagram. I chose this question because I found it very tender, and because I’m interested in the strange social quandaries that can accompany grief in the modern era. I also relate a lot to their anxieties about social media and, since publishing this essay tangentially about Instagram, have been feeling like I left a lot out!
Thank you so much for trusting me with your questions. I read every single one and wish I could answer them all (would need more wisdom, time). You can submit your own here—the form is fully anon.
Hi Baby!
Two weeks ago, my dad passed away. He had been sick but stable for a long time and then made the decision to stop treatments. From there he died actually pretty quickly, although we had hoped he wouldn't and the couple days waiting around while he was in hospice felt like an eternity. For some reason, since his death, I've been thinking a lot about…wait for it...Instagram. I don't use social media that much (my last post was over a year ago), but in the days after his death I started looking at photos, both for my own memories and, if I'm being honest, to see if there was anything worth posting.
I do think instagram can be a good way to get ‘news’ out to people. I told all the people closest to me what happened but I can think of a couple who still probably don't know. Then again, does it matter? They didn't know my dad, and while I'm sure they want to wish me ‘condolences,’ posting on Instagram just feels icky to me. These friends fall into the category where texting them out of the blue would also feel a little icky, like I'm looking for attention, which I guess Instagram feels like, too. Mainly, It doesn't seem like a dignified way to talk about my dad. I can't sum him up in photos or videos, let alone words. Even in writing this question, I worry I'm drawing you an incomplete image of a sick dad, which was such a small, small part compared to the love and brilliance he brought into my and my family's life. We were super close and living in a world without him is so bizarre, it still brings me to my knees.
I didn't talk much about my dad being sick (I guess because I didn't want to jinx it? and it also felt complicated—he didn't have some clean diagnosis with doctors setting a timeline) and I don't know how I will in the future. I have experienced this Instagram-grief conundrum before. My older brother passed away 10 years ago and at first I posted about him a lot (it was a different era when social media seemed less gross), which also mirrored talking about him a lot—volunteering to strangers that, yes, I have two older brothers, one who's dead. Now when people ask, I mainly avoid the question, sometimes to the point of having friends of years who I've never directly told about my brother, which also makes me feel guilty. I have one or two posts about him and I sometimes secretly hope that's a way people can connect the dots without me having to talk about something so hard, but maybe I'm just avoiding tough conversations.
So I guess my questions for you are: How do we talk about death? In real life or on social media? *Is* it undignified to do an in-memoriam-type post on Instagram? Or if I don't post on social media/talk about the people I lost, am I in some way dishonoring them by keeping it a secret? I don't believe that last part, but I feel like that's the logic of social media sometimes.
Thanks,
Dadless
I’m so so sorry you lost your dad. How completely devastating. Even though you said he was sick for a long time and that he chose to stop treatments, even the most “expected” deaths can still feel shocking when they come to pass. I hope you don’t discount anything you’re feeling right now just because you knew it was coming. I say that because you seem like the type of person who might discount your feelings at times—intellectualize them, counter them with facts, undermine them with moral scruples. I do that a lot too, which is probably why I felt called to answer your question.
Setting aside how to talk about death or whether Instagram is worthy of that conversation, my main advice is to let go of the notion that there is a right and wrong way to grieve (or more broadly, a right or wrong way to feel anything). In my own experiences with grief, I know how weird it feels to run all the social calculations around it, trying to figure out how much to say or show. It can start to feel like a performance, which can make you feel phony. But I think all that is part of grief, too—having to clumsily navigate the gap that forms between you and other people. To do it gracefully, I think, would be a paradox.
In “Death of the Party,” an essay by Raven Leilani for n+1, she explores dealing with the deaths of her father and brother while having to (of all things) promote her first novel. She finds herself laughing at the wrong times, and the wrong things. “I was embarrassed,” she writes. “To be grieving incorrectly, to be doing it publicly, to be preoccupied with whether I was doing it well. Dissonance was everywhere.” But she observes that grief is itself a “language of dissonance,” placing dissimilar things next to each other to surprising and poetic effect. So why shouldn’t you, in the wake of a profound and private loss, find yourself pondering (of all things) the flat and public world of Instagram?
As cynical as I’ve been about social media, I’m still an extremely active consumer of social posts, and I think that speaks not just to its addictive superficial appeal but the fact that it fills a social void in post-industrial society. Whether it does that humanely or ethically is another question, but it’s undoubtedly a social space, with opportunities to connect and communicate that can have a real impact offline. In my rush to identify why I find it (in your words) gross or undignified, I often miss what can be useful about it—or what gaps it manages to fill, however half-heartedly—and it seems like you may be doing the same thing.
At the risk of shifting the focus to a more trivial concern for a second, your question reminded me of something I’ve been ruminating on myself, spurred by my recent essay on selfies. After I published it, I realized I’d omitted something I shouldn’t have, which is that I sometimes miss taking selfies and sharing them, or posting in general. When I realized this, the essay felt a little fraudulent to me, or at least incomplete, and I worried I may have alienated people or recruited them into my shame. The lesson for me has been that when I try to explore a topic from a purely moral standpoint, I can erase aspects of myself that are messier and less morally driven, but no less human and acceptable, like the longing to be acknowledged, loved, and appreciated, or to be vain or have fun. When I do that, I separate myself from my peers in a way that can feel pretty lonely, and that I sometimes regret.
I sense a similar conflict in your question. Given the intensity of the grief you’re going through, you don’t need to feel any lonelier right now. When you chastised yourself at the mere idea of telling people your father passed away “for attention,” I heard my therapist’s voice echo in my head: What’s so wrong with doing something for attention? Wanting to feel seen, for your grief to be acknowledged, recognized, and tended to by your friends—those are extremely prosocial and self-preserving instincts. Sure, Instagram isn’t always the most effective tool for communing. It can be vapid, transactional, and alienating in its own way, but every time I’ve posted something meaningful or vulnerable on my account, I’ve received a genuinely moving outpouring of support and kind words. That counts for something.