How should we deal with death in the social media age?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/17/death-social-media-grief-facebook-twitter-text

Version 0 of 1.

What would you do if you received a text message from beyond the grave? Or, slightly less spookily, what would you do if your new phone suddenly started to receive dozens of text messages from anonymous numbers that were clearly intended to be sent to a recently deceased relative?

That was the dilemma faced this week by a person whose phone number used to belong to a beloved late grandmother from South Shields, whose mobile phone was buried with her. The person in question – it’s unclear exactly who it was – began to be bombarded with messages from grieving friends and family. They replied to a bereaved granddaughter with the well-meaning but also creepy message: “I’m watching over you, you’ll get through this, you’ll be all right.” Cue an understandable family freakout.

Sure, you’re on shaky ethical ground when you text back to a message clearly intended for a dead person – not as shaky as the people who happily tweeted a picture of a train fatality this week before the next of kin could be informed – but then there’s no accepted moral code when death in the social media age throws up such conundrums. How exactly are we supposed to cope with the passing of our loved ones when our principal means of communication with them may well have been through text messages or over Facebook?

What is the etiquette when you’re faced with their newly defunct phone number and a written record of everything you texted to them on your phone, or a profile page littered with sympathetic messages? Is it OK to send them texts from time to time and demand that the phone company render your loved one’s old number unusable, as the family from South Shields did? Is it wrong to send a nice reply saying what you think they’d want to hear if you receive the texts by accident?

Elsewhere, are you obliged to join in the online griefathon, and are you less bereaved in the eyes of your peers if you don’t submit a long post to their Facebook wall detailing how you’ll “see them in heaven one day”?

When one of my school friends died unexpectedly last year, my thoughts on the matter of “social network grievers” were resolutely cynical. Grief, I reasoned, shouldn’t be part of your carefully constructed Facebook facade, another throwaway comment in a superficial world full of selfies and Fomo (fear of missing out). A truly grief-stricken individual sits at home crying softly to themselves, preferably in a black veil, or possibly wails in public if the deceased was an especially close family member. They don’t retweet friends saying “RIP James xxx” or clog up Facebook with the public display of their own bereavement on a generic memorial page. That sort of performative sadness is, somehow, wrong – we all indulged at the funeral, and now it’s time for the stiff upper lip.

I had no reason to feel so contemptuous toward people who used social media in this way, beyond a vague intuition that making death public wasn’t right. But technology has changed the process of grieving, and there’s no way to avoid it – no matter how uncomfortable it can make some of us feel. If I had had a voicemail from my friend, I have no doubt that I would have kept it, and probably listened to it. I look at his Facebook profile page often, even if I don’t post my thoughts on it. Nowadays, my initial cynicism towards those who do post has mellowed into an acceptance that this compilation of his photos and funny asides is the modern-day memory book, permanently open to the world.

When researching people who hoard things last year, I interviewed a woman whose twin sister had died in her 20s, leaving behind a wardrobe full of clothes she’d left with her siblings for safekeeping. The interviewee in question told me she’d been advised to clear out the wardrobe, which still stands full of the original clothing in her bedroom, seven years later. A person hadn’t completely “moved on” if they hadn’t removed physical reminders of their loved one’s, others had told her.

“I don’t care if people see me as a hoarder,” she said. “I refuse to throw away my last few reminders of my sister. Fashion and clothes were everything to her. I live a healthy life and accept her death, but there’s more than one way to grieve – and not every way involves forgetting.”

Likewise, we might find the grieving Facebook messages crass, and the idea of burying a woman with her phone so her body can receive texts from above ground strange. But in an age where every movement is documented and every funny story immediately communicated through text, maybe it’s the most natural thing in the world.