‘You can’t hug a laptop’
Grief has never felt lonelier than it does online
Remember mourning before the age of COVID-19? Well-wishers lined up to look the bereaved in the eye and offered hugs big enough to leave a mark. Casseroles piled up at the door. Funerals went off without a hitch, or at least without anything beyond the usual hitch. Friends and relatives filled the living room after the service to exchange fond reminiscences and flowing tears.
Funerals are small and socially distanced now, and often, like so much else, they are streamed online. If you visit a grief group — almost always remotely — you hear at least one story about how social distancing and quarantine precluded a proper goodbye. Grief, a lonely process in the best of times, has never felt lonelier than it does online. After all, you can’t hug a laptop, and the virtual world will never be a suitable substitute for the press of flesh.
So we adapt our grieving. Nearly 200,000 deaths from COVID-19 in the United States will make you do that. Online grieving still has the capacity for deeply meaningful connection. I recently had the misfortune, and the gift, of finding this out for myself.
On July 2, my life partner,
Kate, died of a degenerative brain disease after a long illness. She was living with her parents about five hours from me, and I felt the desperate need to share the devastating news immediately, to pay tribute and seek support. So I went where so many people go for such things: Facebook. I posted a photo of her from our many travels and wrote about the reasons I love her: her generosity, her huge heart and her firecracker spirit.
I’m not sure what I expected, but I was overwhelmed by what I received. Hundreds of well-wishers arrived at my virtual door, some with great Kate stories, others with heartfelt condolences. Every time I looked down a few more people had reached through the Wi-Fi to express their love and support.
Kate would have mixed feelings about all of this. She would always rather do things in person, which was also the best way to experience her warmth and honesty. She didn’t even like talking on the phone. To her, Facebook was a cultural and professional necessity — she spent her career in the nonprofit sector — and Twitter was a foreign concept. But she also loved to connect, and I feel like she would have adapted to the realities of pandemic communication. (As it was, her disease made all but the most rudimentary communication impossible by the time COVID-19 hit).
Social media can be cold and impersonal, but in my most painful moments it sustained me. It gave me much needed comfort. It made me feel less alone.
After the first post, some Facebook commenters expressed a desire for more tales of Kate. I happily obliged. In the days following her death I cranked out stories about how Kate always did the right thing and treated everyone with dignity, whether you were the CEO or a hungry homeless man. I dug up a photo from when we visited an alpaca farm in Maine and wrote about Kate’s undying love for animals. Every day the words poured out of me, guided by my memories of the woman I will always love. And every day my virtual community responded.
This wasn’t my only instance of web-assisted grief. For months I’ve frequented an online grief group run by grief guru David Kessler, launched specifically for the painful combination of grief and quarantine. There I’ve found real friends who have helped keep me going. Along the way I was steered toward multiple Zoom grief groups. Zoom has become a ubiquitous and divisive emblem of COVID-19 communication. Its “Hollywood Squares” aesthetic and clunky functionality — Am I muted? Who muted me? — make Zoom an easy mark for criticism.
But Zoom, like Facebook, can make grief easier, not harder. I’m part of one group based in Colorado, another in Florida. I am currently based in Houston. Save for the exercise of figuring out the time difference, we might as well be in the same house, especially once we start sharing. Whatever impact gets lost in intimacy is more than made up for in reach.
“I’m grateful to Zoom for allowing us to provide grief groups across geographic distances,” says Alexandra Donovan, bereavement coordinator and chaplain for Compassus hospice in Fort Collins, Colo., who also moderates grief groups on Zoom. She recalls a recent three-person grief group whose participants were based in Houston, Ohio and Colorado. In October she will oversee a group memorial, in which mourners will send photos of loved ones in advance and plant bulbs in honor of their loved ones. “We’ll hold space for people to get their hands dirty,” she says, “which is a pretty good metaphor for the grief process.”
But you don’t need a pandemic to grieve online. Houstonian Chantal King lost her mother to respiratory failure last November. She started a podcast, Grieve Me Alone, and started making and selling sweaters adorned with sayings of grief (“My mom died. That’s why I’m like this”). By the time her grandmother died from COVID-19 earlier this month, King had already built up a large and supportive grief community on Twitter and Instagram.
“I’m a very public griever,” King says. “The most authentic friendships I’ve made have been with other grievers on social media. It doesn’t matter who you lost, or how you lost them. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all connected through grief. It’s the jell that keeps us close.”
Of course, there remain a few bugs in the virtual system. Kate’s family had a very private funeral service, due mostly to the pandemic. Those who couldn’t make it out to East Texas were invited to watch on Facebook Live. One catch: the mighty algorithmic Facebook machine flagged some of the songs played at the service for copyright violation. Thus the plug was pulled, the images from the funeral suddenly replaced by a stark message: “This content is no longer available.”
Here was the impersonal, monolithic Internet, unconcerned with your grief, here to remind you to watch your step. The service was eventually reposted, the offending music excised, but by then the mood of reverence had long been interrupted. It felt like I was trampled by a digital Bigfoot.
In time the casseroles will return, and the living rooms will overflow anew. Until then, we live and die by the double-edged sword of online grief. No, it’s not perfect. But in times of crisis you take what you can get. This is the time to remember there’s more than one way to say goodbye.