Our lives are more digital than ever. So too, then, are our deaths. But how do we find closure in death when we still get Facebook reminders?
Grieving a friend in the digital age is strange; it’s like grieving somebody who’s still there.
At least that’s what I found when I lost my friend Isaac in January 2024. They may be gone from the physical realm, but in the digital realm, they are very much still alive.
As the first generation to grow up with technology (I made my first Facebook account at 12), we now have access to innumerable photos, videos, voice notes and likes, which together build an immortal digital footprint.
The omnipresence of someone’s digital afterlife can be overwhelming. From automated reminders that it’s somebody’s birthday, to notifications that you still owe a dead friend money for a dinner you split – the digital realm’s ignorance about your loved one’s death can send you swift jabs of fresh pain without warning.
Journalist Cory Doctorow told BBC Radio 4 that when we die, “we leave behind our appointments and our thoughts, our ideas and our organisational structures. We leave behind our personal Dewey-Decimal Systems – a totally entangled hairball of the important and the unimportant.”
But the “unimportant” becomes forever important once it outlives its creator. Old messages become an archive of words exchanged with a loved one who will never again be contactable. An Instagram account is now a digital grave—a place to visit and reflect on a life lived and lost.
“People across cultures and across millennia have always had the instinct to stay connected to the dead and they have pulled the available technologies of the day into service”
Dr Elaine Kasket
A day before Isaac passed away unexpectedly, he sent a song to one of our friends. It was I Think of You by Rodriguez. What would have otherwise been part of a sweet but routine exchange of song recommendations has now become a poignant anthem of grief for my group of friends.
Professor of Psychology Jennifer McIntosh explains that the digital presence of someone after they die can be both useful and challenging for those who grieve them.
“Part of the grief process is to encounter the reality of loss, and it’s a harsh reality. I frankly don’t know whether this is more complicated or more useful than it used to be,” she says.
Until recently, organising memories of someone was inherently physical. You had printed photographs, perhaps a few home video tapes. “The process of sorting through your photographs made the reality so clear… There was a cruel and final absoluteness about it.”
But this physicality is shifting. When we grieve in the digital age, things are more intangible and tangled. The social media accounts of friends who have passed away exist on the same apps as my living friends.
This lack of separation, according to Professor McIntosh, can stunt our ability to process, move on and “settle into the gone-ness of that person in what we call the ‘dead not dead distinction’.”
Dr Elaine Kasket is a cyberpsychologist and author who works in the death space. In her research, she found that those grieving today are more likely to leave a comment on someone’s social media page than visit a gravestone.
In an interview with Esquire, she explains that “profile pages are not only manifestations of a dead person, but offer a more tangible connection with them. [Grievers] believe they are being ‘heard’ by the person they are grieving.”
Communicating with the dead is nothing new, whether you believe they can ‘hear’ you or not. Dr Kasket points out that “people across cultures and millennia have always had the instinct to stay connected to the dead and they have pulled the available technologies of the day into service.”
Isaac was close friends with my boyfriend, Ethan. He was the first friend Ethan made when he moved from Perth to Melbourne as a 22-year-old. Among other things, Ethan and Isaac shared a love for music. They constantly shared new songs they had discovered, and we often went to gigs together.
When Isaac passed away, his girlfriend made his Spotify playlists public. I asked Ethan how he found returning to Isaac’s music after his death.
“I found myself searching back through his playlists and finding songs that we both listened to together… just listening to the music that he loved made me really feel him and his presence”, he says.
One of Isaac’s playlists, a collection of ambient music named ‘Quiet’, is most important to Ethan: “Isaac was a loud person and very extroverted, always one of the biggest energies in the room. But when we were together, just us, he wasn’t like that, he was very introverted. I loved that side of him, and that playlist reminds me of all those quiet and calm aspects of connecting with a friend. I think we still have those conversations sometimes.”
It’s clear we are facing a new frontier of grieving, where someone’s digital footprint is suspended in time, for good and for ill. As Professor McIntosh suggests: “It’s all subjective – what’s helpful for one person is painful for the next. All the textbooks on grief need to be rewritten, don’t they?”
Featured image by Iqbal Farooz via Pexels.