My grandmother's funeral was quiet. I was young, so I can recall only a sliver of that day in Melbourne, but I do remember the silence.
In places like Australia, the public tradition of mourning is largely that of Anglo-Saxon stoicism. My grandmother was neither British nor Christian, but what I remember as the thorough decorum of her passing formed my idea of "proper mourning."
Social media put an end to all that. On Twitter and Facebook the practice is loud. It's noisy and decadent. Even obnoxious.
SEE ALSO:Carrie Fisher was a bold advocate for people with mental illnessIn a year marked by the worst of everything, the march of celebrity death was a horribly steady and repetitive drumbeat.
You might have thought we would tire of public prostrations of anguish, but the furore that marked David Bowie's passing in February has seemed more than matched by the double gut punch of George Michael and Carrie Fisher in the twilight of this year.
The public wailing and tweets about "2016 being the worst year ever" when there have been and will be worse had seemed tawdry to me, but I regret feeling that way now.
After Bowie's death, I was "grief policing," as Megan Garber put it in The Atlantic.
Grief policing may be a fitting thing for a culture that has elevated ’you're doing it wrong’ to a kind of Hegelian taunt, that treats every social-media-ed expression as a basis for an argument, and that is on top of it all generally extremely confused about how to mourn ‘properly’. Such policing, however, very much misses the point.
The grief police are not thinking of Carrie Fisher's daughter when they tell you not to tweet. Most often, they're uncomfortable with either the idea of mourning celebrity or the triviality of social media as a forum for expressing bereavement.
The impulse is to control how people express their feelings in public, very separate from supporting the actual bereaved.
Celebrity culture is certainly a problematic form of mass distraction, but the work of artists can wake you up. My childhood memories do not coalesce strongly around Bowie, Michael or Fisher as they do for others, but like Muhammad Ali and Prince, I understood them to be giants.
Along with other members of the "grief police," I was not immune when it suited me. My parents listened to Leonard Cohen when I was a child, so like the typical cliché, I listened to "Marianne" after his passing and cried.
I almost tweeted about it but held back, and not because I had nothing to say.
If you think Facebook platitudes are uniquely bad, you must have never stood in a greeting line at a funeral home.
Others have expressed their disgust with the mania of public celebrity mourning, as shells rained down on Syria, Yemen and elsewhere. The social outpouring seemed grotesque in comparison to images of broken bodies.
To those people, you are right. But also, will that shame you're trying to inflict be useful? I don't think so.
People can mourn all types of tragedies at once, of course. A rigorous lack of mourning for the passing of art and those who make it isn't something to bully people with. Art is how we process and understand the world. When you lose an artist such as Prince or Bowie, you lament the closing of a unique portal.
Unfortunately for those who'd prefer their mourning relegated to the family home or to the church, grief takes place on social media because it's where we are.
Lovers of Cohen's or Prince's music are part of a chosen family, no less significant if they come together under a hashtag rather than a roof. And if you think Facebook platitudes are uniquely bad, you must have never stood in a greeting line at a funeral home.
In a year marked by "fake news" filtered through Twitter and Facebook, as well as real news that seemed devastating and too intractable to grasp, the death of a beloved artist is a tangible fact. They were alive, now they're dead. You can hold onto that and feel its edges, and that is comforting.
The rituals of public grief are sentimental, sometimes to the point of grossness, but only because we are sentimental. If you're asking people to put logic over feeling on social media -- you can try, but you will not succeed. Ask yourself if you really want to.
TopicsSocial Media
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