Grieving Online
This one is weird and personal, forgive me!
Let’s start with a sob story. I never knew my real dad. All I had was three anecdotes from my mom and a couple of songs he liked. I conjured up a vague concept of a man and wondered how close my guess was. I dreamt of our reunion. Maybe I’d wait until I was graduated so I could prove I’d been perfectly capable without him. Maybe it would be part of my midlife crisis and he would give me some hard truth that changed me for the better. He had always been a bit mythological in that way. A complete mystery to me, and therefore limitless in his potential.
Cut to a fourteen year old version of me, surfing the web on my little bedazzled netbook. I have always been chronically online so it is only fitting that I would find my estranged father’s obituary via google search. And not just an obituary but an “online gravesite” where his family members (which I am also estranged from) posted photos, messages, and scripture to him. Or his spirit? Or maybe each other? Not totally clear on that one. Regardless, this was my first true introduction to him and he had already been dead for about seven years.
The website itself was and still is a bizarre place, with a user interface design you might call ‘liminal’. A tiled photo of him holding a fish makes up the background of the webpage itself. The typography is composed of default web fonts. The tabs are beige. The links are blue. It reeks of old web HTML but was clearly crafted with intention and care. I have spent hours upon hours clicking through this time capsule because my father, whom I have never known and will never know, lives there.
That is the larger window on the netbook screen in this illustration, by the way. The smaller window is the Windows Live Messenger chat my best friend stayed on all night with me after I found the haunted website and cried for 12 straight hours. He’s a real one for that. The itunes screen is.. iTunes. And across all my little devices and screens, right back where it came from, I stashed away my grief.
My family, those that even knew, didn’t really understand why I was mourning the potential of a relationship; one that hadn’t yet had the chance to disappoint me, and so was still immaculate. This misshapen grief lived online for a long time. It showed up candidly on my tumblr and blogspot and web chats and playlists because offline, though it bled through in many insidious ways, I was never allowed to call it what it was. I could only make space for it online and leave it there.
As an adult (on a very different internet than existed then) I almost feel lucky to have grieved so languidly online, revisiting a singular webpage until I could see it in the back of my eyelids. Of course it felt uniquely horrible and frustrating at the time, but I suspect most grief does. It seems almost excessive now to craft an entire website around your loved one. There’s so many decisions and so much media to gather. So much work to build these freaky little time capsules, a practice that I think was abandoned once people’s own digital footprints filled the void. Even still, mourning on the internet today is in many ways much more intrusive and fleeting.
It’s rather normal to learn of someone’s passing via facebook in the middle of a workday you can’t cut short. Or to have an instagram feed interrupted by what is essentially an obituary. So unsettling and ubiquitous that millennial comedians are inclined to write songs about it (see: Bo burnham, White woman’s Instagram). And actually why not max out our emotional regulation? Why not consume unprecedented amounts of advertising right alongside not just heartfelt memorials, but genocidal atrocities; an even more collective and overwhelming grief? And still, be expected to make space for it online and leave it there. I digress.
All that to say grief on the internet is really strange. It always has been and I suspect it will only get weirder. Fear not though, people are still posting new obituaries on the memorial website whose UI hasn’t been updated since 2007.
Back to the sob story! For all intents and purposes my dad was just some guy. He may have always been an asshole or he may have redeemed himself in the ways that really mattered. I’ll never know. But I do know I’m older now than he ever was which makes me sad for him regardless.
I’ve heard you die a second death the last time someone says your name, and I suspect reading it on a fucked up looking webpage is counted in that.
I’m certain I’ll keep checking it.
Thanks for sticking around, sorry this one was sad and weird but sometimes it’s just like that!
If you do have a dad I hope he’s cool and nice and that he has a lovely father’s day.