Korie Mulholland was 21 years old when her brother, Kwinn Mulholland, passed away suddenly. The siblings had begun to establish their own lives: Korie had been away at college for a couple of years, and 19-year-old Quinn was working at McDonald’s.
In 2012, Facebook was only 8 years old, but it had already claimed its place as the most visited social media platform. After Kwinn passed, Korie noticed comments on his page from many of his friends.
“He had all of these friends and people in his life that I didn’t know about,” Korie says. “I remember reading inside jokes that they posted and seeing the side of my brother that I didn’t know about—and I would have never known about, if it weren’t for social media. It gave me an appreciation for all the people he had in his life who cared about him and who missed him.”
Since its conception, social media has changed the way we process grief—in some cases for the better, and in others, maybe not so much. Social media has made it easier to notify others about a loved one’s death while the family is still dealing with the initial shock, and it has also brought opportunity for people to come together and celebrate their loved one. But on the flip side, social media users may also use public grief for attention or profit.
Let’s take a closer look at the ways that social media has changed the way we grieve, as well as the pros and cons of using it to express grief for our lost loved ones online.
Notifying others
It’s never welcome news to find out that someone you were once close with passed away, and it especially isn’t pleasant to find out via social media. But for families, social media can relieve some of the burden of getting the word out about funeral services and other arrangements.
“Being 19, a lot of [Kwin’s] friends had gone away to college,” Korie says. “I didn’t know his friends from high school and didn’t have contact information, but they were able to find out and come to the funeral and the wake. The place was packed—there was not enough room for everyone who attended.”
Grieving online: Together while apart
Microblogging, or posting frequent social media statuses, offers a mode of undirected communication that helps people reach out for support. Research indicates that this type of communication helps people feel less alone in difficult times.
“People that are sharing their grief or grieving online are really looking for support [and] community,” says Jessica Moneo, a trauma therapist who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona. Although doing this can be cathartic, it doesn’t replace in-person relationships. Moneo still urges her patients to seek offline support outside of those micro bonds.
“That feeling of support and community [online is] beautiful, and there’s certainly a place for that,” Moneo adds. “How do we kind of mesh that while [coming back] to bringing casseroles to people’s houses when someone passes away?”
According to Emily Raymond, Ph.D., a pediatric psychology fellow at Stanford, social media can be a space to bond over a shared love for someone who has made an impact on the community.
“If a schoolteacher dies, a lot of their students can come together online and talk about their positive memories of the person,” she says. “[It’s a] positive way that social media can help us process grief.”
Attention seeking and monetization
Raymond adds that people often rush to publicly grieve on social media, even for people they don’t know well.
“Sometimes it’s celebrities [or] sometimes even just people in your hometown that maybe you don’t even know very well,” she says. “But you can kind of jump on this bandwagon of, ‘Oh, I knew this person; therefore, I can be part of their spotlight of grief.”
She’s also worried about people using grief for monetary gain. “Even if it’s a true personal grief that they’re experiencing, they’re able to monetize that, which is a very ethically and morally complex thing,” Raymond says.
No right way to grieve
Do you have to be close to people to grieve for them? Moneo doesn’t think so.
“What if we relabel [attention seeking] as connection seeking? It [might be] the first time that anybody they’ve known has passed away,” she says. “And so for them, it does feel really big. Who are we to say who can and can’t grieve?”
The one caveat is that grieving online must be appropriate.
“If it doesn’t show them in a good light or you’re talking about addictions and [loved ones] don’t want that up, there’s a place to have a conversation around that,” she adds.
As for Korie, she’s grateful that social media has provided a space for the people who loved Kwinn to share about him, as well for his family to see how loved he was—and still is.
“My brother’s best friend still posts on his Facebook,” Korie says. “He’s said [he] could do it in [his] journal but that [he] posts on Kwinn’s wall so that [my] mom can still see that he still cares about him and thinks about him.”
Photo by CandyRetriever/Shutterstock.com
