Analogue vs digital grieving: how tech has already changed the way we mourn

Where are we now with grief ? How does grief fit into our digital world? Has it been changed by the vastness of the internet or by the fact that a social media profile can still live after someone has gone? What does it mean to grieve for someone in the age of death trolls, Facebook memorials?

I started becoming aware of this new world of grief through Griefcast, the podcast I started in 2016, which examines grief and death. ‘Digital grievers’ would casually invite me to look at their phone screen to show me their dead person’s photo as if this were normal. I say this as only I, an analogue griever, can.

My dad died in 1998, before the internet was the world we lived in, five months before Google was created, six years before Facebook, seven years before Youtube, [so] my grief is not stored in the digital sphere. For me, the objects and memories that keep my dad present only have a physical presence – a Polaroid of me on his shoulders, a landline phone bill with ‘Let’s Discuss! Dad x’ written in felt-tip pen. My grief is old-fashioned, mechanical, outdated. If you google my dad’s name, nothing comes up. I can’t read his texts or listen to voicemails. His voice is a foreign country; they record things differently there.

I had no idea how quaint my analogue memories were until I started talking to digital grievers. They didn’t have to commit every scrap and relic of that person to memory – they had a backup drive, or even just a phone with a 32GB memory. In the small machine that they carried with them everywhere, they could keep messages, emails, texts, Whatsapps, voice notes, photos, videos, social media profiles, websites. The internet was holding infinite fragments of their person.

The abundance of memories available to them bewildered me. At first, I felt jealous, especially when comparing my analogue scrapbook of memories to theirs: the bile-pit feeling that is made even more extreme in grief – when it feels like someone else had more – more time, more care, more hope, more luck – more memories.

But as that feeling waned, I could see that what I was really feeling was sadness, a sense of loss at not having the kind of memories that the digital world allowed.

And yet gradually, I have come to realise that memories do not need to be HD, virtual or 4K quality to matter. The objects you hold dear, the fragments you have gathered of your dead person, are worthy of your love and appreciation. Sometimes referred to as ‘transitional objects within grief ’, they come to mean more to us during the process of grieving. Our person is somehow contained in them, just as a child has a blanket to remind them they are safe.

Tiny things can hold love, a childhood, a time before death was part of your vocabulary. I have the glass mushroom Dad gave me when I was a child – green-teal glass with a rainbow swirl like a slick of oil on top of it. Turkey? Malta? I remember going into the shop, a day trip from our package holiday hotel. I remember seeing it among the many shelves of tourist glass and thinking it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and then telling him this. He offered to buy it. He was listening to me, focused for once, and he bought it for me. I felt overwhelmed: now I owned the most beautiful thing in the world. It sits on my desk today, reminding me: you had a dad and you were loved.

The longer I have grieved, the more I realise so many of the memories are just that: a reminder that you were loved and that you loved in return, in whatever complicated way that was expressed. The things I do have could probably fit into one cardboard box – just enough to hold the memory of a dead dad after twenty years. Not much, but, if I’m honest, it’s enough.