Last week, NPR’s Scott Simon’s mother passed away, and Scott tweeted from her hospital bed. It sounds awful, but it was weirdly touching. I’m writing in Salon about public grieving and how we use social media during tragedy. A bit:
Where’s the line between an Internet overshare and a compelling peek into human existence? NPR’s Scott Simon walked it this week as he live-tweeted from his mother’s deathbed. Just that description — “he live-tweeted from his mother’s deathbed” — makes it sound crass and attention-seeking. And yet Simon’s tweets were the opposite. They were largely well-crafted. They were alternately heartfelt, sad and funny, sometimes all at once. They captured the banality of a hospital death, the desire to cherish every moment and the simultaneous slow creep of time as a loved one lies dying. Mostly, they paint a portrait of his mother. She’s clever, she’s funny, she’s vulnerable. She loves her son. Her son feels compelled to tell the world about her.
“Do you want to tell me about her?” is one of the few things therapists and grief counselors recommend one say to a grieving friend. It’s a question that taps into the fact that the grieving person’s entire universe is consumed with the one they’ve lost. It allows them to explain whom it is they’re grieving for, to carve out the shape of a real person in a process that can otherwise be sterile and ritualized, the funeral and its quiet etiquette, the appropriate flowers or cards or donations in the deceased’s name.
We embrace tradition and convention in death because extended public displays of deep sadness in our culture are awkward for those witnessing them and therefore frowned upon, and also because when you’re engulfed in deep sadness there’s frankly not a lot of energy to get creative. “Let me tell you about her” allows the grieving person to explain, in the midst of a familiar ritual, why their loved one was particularly special. The impulse to explain how a person was can feel incredibly urgent in the immediate wake of that person’s death. The telling of stories isn’t just a way to make up for the fact that the dead person can no longer make their own stories; the telling solidifies those things in the memory of the teller, making real again and again the fact that though the person is gone, you’ll remember them.
There’s a fear behind that, too: What happens when I start to forget?
The full piece is here.