Grief in the Digital Age
The other day I shared a blog post that moved me deeply. Moved me to tears, in fact. And other people cried and shared it too.
Then I saw a status update from the author of the post, satisfied that 38,000 people had seen it, and I felt, well, uncomfortable.
Now, 38k page views is a great number. She seems like a nice woman. She’s suffered a terrible loss.
So why should I feel uncomfortable with this?
Because the post dealt with the death of her baby, was written and posted on the day he died, and there are two other children in the family.
And it’s not the content that gets to me. It’s a wonderful post.
It’s the priorities.
And the timing.
The very same day her baby died, with two grieving children, she was on the internet, tending her blog.
Which seems rather as though her priorities are her readers and her audience, rather than her two surviving children.
I don’t write much about blogging, but there’s quite a lot of work that goes into putting a post up. You have to edit pictures, add them, arrange them, add links, post it, and, of course, share on social media, such as Facebook. And, of course, you have to be in a frame of mind to write coherently and do all that jazz..
I’d guesstimate there’s about three hours work went into that post.
How can you do all that the day your child has died?
How, when you are grieving, when your other two children are grieving, can you turn to the computer, switch it on and prepare a blog post?!
The same day!
Now, I understand writing as therapy. I TOTALLY get writing as therapy. I GET how you could want to share your loss with the world and hear the world shout back.
But the same day?!
I simply don’t understand how anyone can be thinking about their blog at the time their child dies.
That’s it.
That’s the only thing that matters, surely?
And the grief of the rest of your family? The needs of your other two children.
How does that even work?
“Hey, honey! You take the other two, I REALLY need to get this post out.”
I chatted about this privately with a couple of people. They, like me, had been moved to tears by the coherent passion of the post, and shared, and now felt the same unease that I do.
Blogging is a peculiar thing, particularly when you make money at it (which I, since people started offering it to me, now do).
You’re selling your life, in a way. And, when you have a kid, you’re selling your child’s life, too. Or, in this instance, his death.
Now, this family had done a very brave thing. When the baby was diagnosed as terminally ill, they’d taken the family travelling to give them all good memories.
And the blog is one part of a fundraising mechanism by which the terminally ill child funds their travels. Or did.
What crystallised my concern was this.
The Facebook status update of 38,000 views.
Cos, while I can (just about) understand going on Facebook the day you lose your child, I CANNOT understand checking your stats.
Now, any blogger who tells you they don’t check their stats is lying.
At any given time, I can see exactly how many people are on this site, what pages they’re reading, where they’re from, how long they’re spending, who’s slowly making their way through the archive, who’s clicking in for seconds from Stumble to look at some pictures then onto the next thing….
It’s dangerously addictive.
But, JESUS! Checking your stats the day after your child died?
I’ve seen some weird stuff on the internet, and Lord knows I’m guilty of oversharing myself. I’ve seen a post on a death in the family, of a family member whose funeral the writer chose not to attend, SEO’d (that is, written to attract Google searchers and score a high position on Google) for the phrase “death in the family traveling”.
And that put me off that writer.
And the notion of sitting down, opening the laptop, and laying out a blog post, picking the bikini photos to accompany it, when your baby is barely cold, and your two surviving children, one would think, now need you more than at any time in your life, well, that’s put me off this writer, too.
How can you even look at the photos without dissolving into tears? Let alone edit them?
Because it’s great when a post goes viral. It’s lovely.
But in what universe, when you’ve lost a child – yes, even when you’ve been gearing for that loss, even when that child is (or was) your main source of income and you need to figure out how to take the brand forward – could you even fucking care?!
I agree. I havent read her post and i will not. Hope the baby rests in peace.
I think the baby had a very happy life, so I’m sure he will.
I couldn’t do it. You couldn’t do it. And SO many people will agree with you.
But, if I’ve learned anything from all the grief that I’ve dealt with in my life, it is not to judge people who are grieving. That kind of trauma can affect a person in some awful ways, none that any of us could be equipped to know until we’ve gone through it ourselves. Everyone grieves in their own way. So be it.
You hit a paragraph I took out, there, that everyone *does* grieve in their own ways, Dalene. That said, one of the folk I was talking to worked in grief and it was outside his frame of reference.
For me, the really odd bit about it is the two surviving children, because as a parent of multiple children, you need to look out for the other two as well. And the other point is “same day”. And there’s some further weird stuff around monetisation that I didn’t want to get into here.
i read that post yesterday and while a few things struck me as odd, i thot they gave that child a beautiful life and death that he could have never received here in the states. the medical community would have taken him away and hospitalized him and traumatized him and, you get it.like you said they have been preparing themselves for his death for awhile and it looked to me like he was beginning to really suffer. suffering is the hardest thing to watch, so maybe it was a relief to see him go rest in peace, it woulda been for me. that said, readers have funded their opportunity to show him some of the world and maybe she felt she owed it to them to share her grief, and it possibly consoled her to feel the love. maybe you feel the rawness of the thot of losing your own child right now, but she was prepared. we cant judge, cuz to me she did everything else 100% beautifully.
Oh, I’d definitely agree that it’s almost certainly a better quality of death than in a hospice, although in a hospice he would at least have had palliative care to ease the pain of the last few days, if he was in pain, and, as I said in the post, it was a very brave thing to do, and I think the right thing to do.
And I’d also agree that she certainly does need to write about it for her readers. What made me uncomfortable, only with hindsight, was the timing, and the two surviving children.
I read that post and now that you mention it, it is super super strange to do what she did.
But also after reading Dalene’s comment, I think it must be a grieving thing… or a shock thing… like she was going through the motions of what she would normally do… blogging, etc. but not really “feeling” the severity of the event yet. Still in shock. Still in disbelief. But just going through the motions of normal life.
Has to be…
I can see the “shock” element in it, as well, which does make sense.
And, I think, if he had been the only child, it would have felt a lot less weird to me. But the thing is there are other children in the family.
Although it is kind of disturbing, I would have to agree with Dalene, who are we to judge how someone is grieving? And without knowing the blogger (that post was the first I read for her), I am quite sure she was dissolved in tears while writing and editing the photos, but as you said, I also understand how writing can help her, the whole writing therapy thing.
I haven’t seen her status about the 38k page views either, but I would assume she was kind of thanking the people that shared her grief and offered some nice words of support?
Yes, I guess…
I did read her post, and obviously saddened by her loss. I found it a bit strange that she would write such a detailed post on the day her son died. Like others have said, this is probably her way of grieving. To check her stats…hmmm…kind of strange.
I’m glad you found it odd too.
I read the post and felt sad but at the same time was thinking the same thing….How could she be writing this?…her child just died. I try not to judge though, it could be the way she was trying to cope…but the pictures do make you wonder. I guess she must be extremely addicted to posting…I know some people with this addiction and they can’t seem to stop it. I’m a mother of 3…if I was told my child had some sort of disease that would likely kill him, I wouldn’t be traveling around. Traveling, no matter how pleasurable, is hard on children. Its not all easy. I would have been home trying to make sure this little boy was comfortable and happy in his own little bed each night. She could have followed her traveling dream later since it was a mere 3 years life expectancy. Too bad the child didn’t have a say as to if he’d be happier just being home with all the family.
You make a good point about the addictive element of online life, Nilda: lord knows, blogging is addictive, and social media is too.
I think their whole aim with travelling was for the baby to experience the world. Which is a leftfield decision but one that I can relate to.
I am ashamed of you. How can you judge another grieving mother…. end of story. She will find this post and think was I wrong. Doubt herself, wonder if she did make a mistake. Why is this an issue for YOU. Who cares. Maybe telling her readers was like telling her Mother. Her kids and husband may have been sleeping. I know after my baby had dies I wouldn’t have been able to sleep.
“Why is this an issue for YOU?”
Well, in a way, this is my site, so I write about what’s on my mind: which, that day, that post was. And you respond with what’s on your mind, which is also fine.
You are absolutely right, it is your site. It doesn’t make what you posted right. I hope you never feel judged in the way you judged her.
My point is that when you put things out there on the internet you expect reactions. I have had a reaction from you. Clearly you find it understandable to put out a fully laid out and edited blog post on the day you lose a child.
After an initial extremely emotional response — crying, sharing, as described in the post — various things happened that made it extremely difficult for me to understand that process.
As I’ve explained elsewhere in the comments, one of those things was receiving condolences on *my* loss on my Facebook page (one place where I shared it), to which my gut response was “What the hell?! Are you mad?! As if I’d be blogging if I’d just lost my child! Jesus! It’s clearly not my child… Oh… wait…”
Whenever I put out blog posts, I’m well aware of the possibility that there will be reactions. I’d consider what you’re doing here “reacting” but ask you firstly to think about whether you too are judging (as you put it) and secondly about how a hostile piece to this family would read and whether this is it.
The web, for better or worse, is an interactive medium.
On a basic level you are right Theodora. However, I follow a couple of blogs of families with babies who have EB. When one of these babies die it is heartbreaking. In almost all cases the families blog about it in a similar manner – almost as if they owe those that have encouraged and supported them. I for one appreciate the sadness involved in documenting your baby’s demise but I also appreciate the updates as a blog reader. I have to say however that I haven’t seen a blog post on the same day! Maybe it was 2am and she was too overwhelmed to sleep? Guess we can’t know how someone else would react.
That’s interesting. I don’t follow any of those sites, although I’m aware that there are a lot out there, most of them, I understand, non-monetised, which was an area I don’t really want to get into because that raises all sorts of questions about what a lot of “us” do.
Of COURSE one has to share. But I’m glad to hear that same day is unusual, and, yes, you’re right, you can’t know how someone else will react.
I totally get it. When my daughter died it was the most horrific thing imaginable. And in the first few hours, days and weeks after her death, I constantly relived those last moments. Over and over the final minutes of her life played out in my head. I wrote a lot then because I had to do something – anything – to deal with it. It felt quite literally like I was breaking apart from the inside out and the pain was completely overwhelming.
I didn’t sleep more than 20 minutes at a time for the first month and I promise I had an unbelievable amount of time when my oldest child was sound asleep to relive every moment and document it for others. You have to do anything you can to cope.
For those of you who don’t understand, I am incredibly happy you’ve not had to experience anything like it, but this is an unbearable situation that requires infinite understanding and patience from the rest of us as this family does their best to hold it together.
Thank you for your perspective, Kate, and, also, sorry for your loss. As I said in the piece, I totally GET writing as therapy, and how one would just sit down and write, and write, and write, and get the feelings out and the images out.
It is the mechanics of shaping inchoate grief and writing as therapy into a coherent, fully laid out blog post on the same day, and then checking to see how many people had viewed it, that surprised me.
I think you’re being highly critical, as you do not know every side of the story. She is living on the other side of the world from her family in a completely different time zone. We have no idea if she wrote the post while her family was later sleeping. We don’t know if it was her way of informing her entire family and friends about the death (I would assume so…due to the time difference), and writing is very cathartic. What better time to write about such a life-impacting day than when it is fresh in your mind and you can remember and share every detail? Whether that goes into your personal journal, or is posted on the internet for your family and others to see doesn’t matter. I’m sure she checked the stats on her post after receiving 200+ comments of support! Who wouldn’t? I think it is bad form to criticize anyone grieving the loss of a child.
So, if you lost a child, you’d post the same day, also, and check stats on the post? I’m curious…
I obviously have no idea what I’d do. Do you?For me it would be completely unexpected and sudden. For her…she knew it would come sometime fairly soon. She’s probably been writing the post in her mind since she found out it would happen. I can’t even begin to imagine what I would do! Who am I to judge?
I can imagine myself doing a range of crazy things.
But I can’t imagine myself posting coherently with images and stat-checking the same day, even without other children to care for.
Can you? I did try.
When I received condolences on my loss on my Facebook page after sharing the post, my gut response was “Well, clearly it’s not my child, because I wouldn’t be posting or on Facebook if I’d lost my child today.”
It’s the disconnect between the grief expressed and the functionality behind it that I find very uncomfortable and hard to access.
And I also find the notion of preparing the post in your mind, or drafting the post ahead of time to get something up same day, as others have suggested, uncomfortable.
There are experiences that one registers and notes with a blogger’s hat on. And there are others that one just has.
Count me among the “Who are we to judge?” group. She did what she needed to do in order to grieve, period. I don’t think for a second that she did it for traffic, or money, or anything other than just a desperate need to pour her guts out about a tragic, terrible loss that neither she or her family will ever likely recover from.
“I don’t think for a second that she did it for traffic, or money…”
I don’t think I’ve suggested that that’s why she did it. There’s probably a more considered post in here — and I should probably have sat on this for a while and turned it into something more considered and more general on the intersections of public and private in Web whatever.0 we’re on now.
But what surprised me, and only retrospectively, was: the timing, the coherence (of everything, text, layout, narrative: the piece feels crafted, not like pouring guts out at all) and the mechanics, of stat-checking, of picking out images from a short lifetime’s worth of them, all on the same day. Of continuing to do all the things that we as *bloggers* do.
Interesting post. I don’t think I have a firm opinion – my brain has been trying to formulate one – (unsuccessfully). This is a touchy topic: death – and especially death of a child. I wouldn’t have touched it with a barge pole (but then again, I’m a bit of a wuss – and I don’t like people responding angrily to my posts).
I’m not going to comment – or even give an opinion on this mother or her blogs or her motives. But, it seems to me – that, in general – if you have experienced something as utterly unimaginable as the death of your child – that you seem to be granted (from society, as a whole) a kind of Get-out-of-Jail-Free card.
NOBODY wants to judge a mother who has lost her baby – and especially those of us who are parents.
If this had been a different situation… say – if her husband was in a car crash – and now in a coma… or even, if her husband had passed away (instead of a child)… I think that many people would be far more open to analysing her odd behaviour.
But – because it’s a child. A baby. I think the sheer emotion that surrounds this issue is bound to cloud our judgement.
I know a family who – in my eyes – “market” their two disabled children in a rather distasteful way (mostly in order to raise money). However, they also have that same Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card… because how “dare” any of us “judge” them? These are CHILDREN – disabled children, what’s more! We don’t have the “right” to analyse the questionable behaviour of the parents.
Often, those of us who say: “Who are we to judge?” in a situation like this one… will be the first to respond furiously when a widower quickly remarries (before the grass has had time to grow over his wife’s grave)… or when a wealthy heiress doesn’t seem ‘sad enough’ at the funeral of her husband.
But, when it comes to dead children…
Well.
We can’t even go there.
I possibly shouldn’t have written it, or sat on it for a couple of days and written a diluted version, I think.
But, thank you for the more general observations. It is hallowed ground.
I think, re-reading it that a) the tone is harsher than I would have liked it to be and b) the content is weaker, because I self-censored on some other stuff that was odd about that particular blog post and raised a lot of more practical questions, which is probably why the tone came through more harshly than I had hoped….
And, I think, the “marketing” of children to raise money to cure them or help them is more comprehensible, perhaps, than raising money for a child who is two days from death for…. what?
I am so sad that you wrote this! We should never judge the way a person grieves and no matter how you slice it you have judged her here and it seems really cruel to me. I am sure she will read this and feel badly. How awful! This should have been thoughts kept to yourself in my opinion!
You may well be right, Mary. A lot of people who share my opinions on this and, for that matter, feel more strongly about certain aspects of this particular story than I do have kept their feelings to themselves, and perhaps I should have done too.
I showed a few people a draft before I posted, but perhaps I should have shown more, or sat on it for longer, or, or, or…
What I am curious about, though, is whether, as a blogger, you could, personally, imagine going through all the motions required to get a post up (selecting images, editing images, aligning images, placing images, editing text, posting to social media, checking stats) on the self-same day that you lost a child?
Looking at pictures and crying, yes, taking pictures of the body, yes. Writing LOTS and LOTS of incoherent stuff, yes, once the others are in bed. Updating social media, yes. Even writing a piece of shit post like “I can’t believe what happened today. I’m in pieces. Just letting you know, more later…”
Shaping the whole thing into a coherent piece of work and getting it out there, the self-same day?
Anywise, I’m going to resume normal service on this site. I felt very, very odd about this whole thing. But, yes, you’re probably right. I should have stuck to chatting about it with people who felt a similar unease rather than putting the whole thing out there.
If you were me would you delink?
I actually agree with you. By writing a post on a public website this poor lady is putting herself out there to be judged by the world. It was not a private email to be sent round to family and friends – it was laying this incredibly personal thing for the public to view – and consequently judge. I also think this is strange behaviour and am inclined to agree with the view that blogging every intensely personal detail of family life in this way is now obviously an addictive and automatic for her.
I disagree with the “who are we to judge” crowd. People judge each other all the time. When you put stuff on the internet, the context and “your story” becomes irrelevant -it will be there forever, for anyone to see. So who are we not to judge? While her loss is tragic and terrible – and the internet as a medium is never seems to be a great forum for discussion of death – I still find the post and the stat checking in particular quite shocking.
Thanks. For me it was the timing and the stat-checking that were weird, and I’m so glad you got that.
After writing that post, I felt I needed to flag to Z a couple of, umm, non-child-friendly posts I wrote, of the content of which I felt he should perhaps be advised.
But I do agree that when you put it out there, you put it out there. For all eternity. Even poor old Nightjack’s blog has been revived by others (I loved that site, but he took it down for fear of losing his job after The Times outed him.)
I was waiting to get absolutely pasted for an article I did in the Guardian (and didn’t, in fact). But we navigate a peculiar space right now, which is reshaping public and private, and it will take a while for it to settle down — the old boundaries are moving at bewildering speed, and sometimes I wonder if it will ever resettle.
I don’t necessarily think the woman is being uncaring. Deep grief moves us all in such strange ways. I was closer to one of my grandmothers than anyone else on earth, and I was there, in the hospital, watching her as she (unexpectedly) died of a heart attack. Immediately afterwards, I carried on my life as though nothing had happened. Work, school, friends — I didn’t even mention that she had died. I acted like everything was just fine. Except that I hiccuped. I hiccuped nonstop for 5 days straight. My grandma died over 10 years ago and I still think of her constantly, still dream of her regularly. Sometime grief is not as simple as letting out a stream of tears during a single day or week; sometimes grieving becomes a part of your daily life.
Thanks for your comment.
I can appreciate that numbness, that functionality… Again, that I totally get. I can appreciate getting dinner on the table, and shopping for it, when the bottom’s fallen out of your world, but you’re just cold numb, although I’d note that for most the loss of a grandparent is on a different level from the loss of a child.
I can even imagine, just about, keeping it together for work.
What I don’t get — and I wonder if you can imagine doing that — is not just writing about it, not just thinking about it, but putting together a post on it and doing all the stuff I mentioned on social media.
I can get all sorts of crazy things about grief. I can get jumping off a building, for example. I can get ordering 12 imaginary birthday cakes in the supermarket and laughing hysterically when someone asks why. I can get not crossing the road correctly. I can get the zombie state.
I cannot get the process of putting together a coherent, articulate, crafted blog post complete with edited images on the very same day that a child died that deals with the death of the child. (Something else? Yes. If you’re in zombie mode, hell yeah.)
BUT I don’t necessarily think she’s being uncaring, either. And, despite the fact that there are appeals going out online for money — although the child is dead already — I don’t necessarily think she’s money-motivated. I just find it, well, odd…..
I *get* what you are saying–my reaction to her post was of grief and of *something else* too.
But at the end of the day, in spite of my own feelings about what I would or would not have done differently (and this extends to many of the decisions that this family made once they found out the diagnosis), I keep reminding myself not to judge.
I agree that by putting it ‘out there’, as all bloggers do, we do open ourselves to being judged. But who likes to be judged for the choices that we make? after all, many are of the opinion that we shouldn’t be blogging about our kids either, let along dragging them around the world with us.
For me, the *why i’m doing it* (and this extends from literally why i’m doing blah blah blah to why i’m blogging in general) shouldn’t be the point as much as the *what i’m writing about*. (Although admittedly this is harder with regard to the comment on stats.)
That’s what i’m trying to focus on anyway, the topic of the post itself: death of her child. We have no idea what it’s like to be HER.
Thanks for your comment, Jess. And, in fact, to everyone who’s commented on this thread.
I’m really pleased by how fundamentally thoughtful and civilised everyone’s responses have been here, even those of you who’ve disagreed quite passionately and felt extremely strongly that I should not have written what I did, and/or that what I have written was wrong.
Just for the record, I’ll share where this came from. I shared the post on my Facebook page, and received a couple of generic comments condoling with me on my loss.
Which floored me. I did a complete double-take and my thought process went roughly like this: “What the HELL?! That’s CLEARLY not my child! If my child had died today, I wouldn’t be on f*cking Facebook! I’d be in pieces! Not blogging… Oh, wait, hang on a second…”
I’d already had a couple of private messages from people about the content of the post.
And then I saw the stats thing and I felt (and I’m not saying I was right to do so), a really big “Uhoh!”
And, yes, you are right that the ethical issues around blogging about children extend much further than the extreme case of a site centred on a dying child that includes a fundraising arm. I’ve been thinking a lot about the peculiar public-private space we operate in, as bloggers and on social media, and the comments here have made me think further.
I am constantly surprised that I’m not judged more (I publish all comments that aren’t spam, negative or positive), so this has been an interesting discussion.
Hi Theodora, I came across your post via Windwalker Duo who led me to your site. He had also led me to the site that you’re posting about. I’m glad you wrote this. It makes me feel that I’m not the only one that thought it a bit odd and unusual for someone to write such an organized post on the day their child passes when they have 2 other children to care for and a husband who is obviously also grieving. I don’t judge at all since I’m not a mother and never will be, but I’m glad I read your post. I do believe this opinion had to be stated and explored.
Thank you, Hanna. I’m so glad you felt the same way about, as you put it, “such an organised post”. I wasn’t intending to judge but the post has come out more harshly than it should have done, I think. I’m also glad that you think it’s worth stating.
Insanity. A great example of what is wrong with the world.