The Strange Beauty of Mourning Online

Last September, I got a message from my brother’s memorial Facebook group. The group chat had been created by my aunt shortly after Ben died, nearly a decade ago, so that the people closest to him could share photos and memories. The group is not as active as it once was, but people still post. My mom also created a smaller, private chat for the page—about 25 people, including two of Ben’s high-school classmates, my middle-school best friend’s mother, and our childhood babysitter—but she can’t remember why. The porn bots were the first to use it.

The initial message came from “Corey”: a link to a video, the thumbnail showing a naked woman lying on her back. Next came “Zyaire,” followed by “Eki,” “Ruri,” “Aarav,” and “Ares.” They promised free webcams and “INSTANT SEX IN YOUR AREA.” Their messages received no responses. Could it be that I was the only one who had seen them? Could it be that we all had, and were each hoping, pretending, that we were the only one?

The idea of mourning online strikes many people as skeevy at best. At worst, you have a situation like this, with technology threatening to defile the memory of a loved one. The internet is a strange place to grieve. It is intensely public. It is uncontained. It is constantly refreshing itself. It’s everything we are told grief should not be. But if my loss has taught me anything, it’s that we think about grief all wrong. And in surprising ways, the internet has helped me mourn my brother.

[Read: My dad had dementia. He also had Facebook.]

Ben died young: He fell off the landing of his dorm staircase at 20. I was 17, and he was my closest friend. I learned about the accident over Facebook. I woke up to a message from a stranger: “Hey this is bens friend. I’m in the hospital with him right now. He hurt his head pretty badly. Could you call me as soon as possible,” followed by a phone number. By the time I saw the message, my parents had been reached, and they were on their way to the ICU. I kept refreshing Ben’s page as I raced to follow them, expecting him to post an update saying he was fine after all, an apology for the terror he had caused. But there was nothing.

Mercifully, it was a human being who told me that my brother would die, not an algorithm. A nurse answered each of my questions—had anyone, in the history of medicine, survived an injury like this? Was there an experimental surgery we could try? Was he in pain?—with terrible, relentless candor. There was no hope.

In the hours between the doctors declaring Ben brain-dead and taking him off life support, his Facebook page came alive with comments from friends who had heard of the accident but not its severity. They knew, had to know, that he could not read their posts, but they wrote to him anyway: “Keep pushing through man! Just like those last reps we pushed out on the bench this summer!” I wanted to write: “HE’S DEAD EVERYONE HE’S DEAD DON’T YOU GET IT?!” But of course they didn’t, not yet. And then they did, and they kept on posting as if he wasn’t, writing to him in the second person and present tense: “Your contagious spirit, laughter, and loving heart will always be remembered & treasured”; “Keep smiling; love you man and I am thinking about you constantly. Especially when I am happy and drunk”; “Happy Birthday, Ben”; “Happy SB Sunday.”

At first, I was vicious. There was already too little of my brother to go around—20 measly years. As his sister and constant shadow, I had probably spent more time with Ben than with anyone else on the planet. And I had spent far too little time with him. How much had we had together, really, when I accounted for sleeping, school, showers, vacations, college, and parties I was not invited to? A decade? A month? Now virtual strangers were trying to claim scraps of him for themselves, posting blurry pictures with his face in the background and writing to him dead as if they had known him—loved him—living. My covetousness made me hate them all.

But slowly, I began to appreciate them. I was grateful for those blurry pictures. I was grateful for the memories they unearthed of him. Online, some of his life was restored to me.

I had never seen Ben sweating under a bench press and fluorescent lights, until someone I didn’t know gave me that image. I had never heard the way his voice cracked when he was recording a goofy video for the middle-school girl he really liked or seen the way he tangled his chubby fist into our babysitter’s hair in the three years he lived before I did. In cyberspace, his memory became a commonwealth; his death became less final. The lives that radiated out from Ben’s—the people who loved him, who knew him, who merely knew of him—all had data to give: anecdotes, pictures, videos, rumors. In sharing their data, they gave me more time with my brother.

We now take for granted that the details of a person’s death should be shielded from prying eyes, that their memory should be sanctified. We are not to speak ill of the dead. To be on the safe side, we may not speak of them at all, especially if we were not close in life. We don’t have a right. But this preciousness and privacy around death is a relatively new development and, in my experience, a harmful one.

For most of Western history, death was not a taboo but an inescapable fact. People generally died at home, surrounded by friends, family, neighbors, and spiritual leaders. They were buried in cemeteries in town centers, the living forced to encounter the overturned dirt and stone-etched names of the recently departed during their morning commutes and weekend errands. The bereaved wore black, and sent all of their correspondence on specialized mourning stationery.

Dying and grieving, once treated as inevitable life stages, are now largely sequestered in hospice centers and private support groups. Most Americans are cremated. Mourners are indistinguishable from anyone else on the street. The only corpse I have ever seen was my brother’s, and it was still breathing, heaving mechanically through tubes and shielded by multiple hospital security checkpoints and an opaque, gray privacy curtain.

After those machines were disconnected, presumably by a doctor, out of view of anyone who knew how Ben’s voice sounded and the way he liked his bacon (burnt to oblivion), I went home. Home was where I was expected to go. My parents and I were sustained by a parade of tin-foiled dishes surrendered on our doorstep to save us the indignity of being seen at the grocery store, to save others the discomfort of seeing us at all.

When I did emerge, people kept their distance. Acquaintances, and even some friends, averted their eyes when I crossed their path on my obligatory dog walks or pharmacy visits. They stared conspicuously when I showed up at house parties in the months after his death or—an obvious mistake in retrospect—on the night of his funeral. My grief was my business, to be dealt with on my own time and in my own space: behind the gates of the faraway cemetery or the locked door of a therapist’s office.

Some scholars of digital culture argue that the internet is turning grief from a private experience back into a communal one. If the internet is defined by anything, it is its lack of definition; online, everything flows together. No bright line divides the past and the present, the intimate and the public, the living and the dead. Ben’s Netflix profile still grins each night when I, a late weaner from my parents’ subscriptions, go to numb my brain for sleep with the requisite half hour of competitive baking. Ben shows up in my list of Instagram followers and Facebook friends exactly the same as all my living social connections. It’s easy to imagine, when I see the text box at the top of his Facebook page daring me to write something to Ben, that I still could, and that he could still write back.

It is not healthy, I am told, to feel for openings in the wall between my brother and myself. The stages of grief—from denial to acceptance—are widely misinterpreted as sequential steps rather than jumbled states of being. I know that Ben is dead, but it is impossible to accept that he is gone. He comes up for me constantly, in the cadence of my own laugh, in the taste of wild blueberries, in virtually every memory of my childhood. “Closure” has always felt less like a personal healing goal and more like a societal imperative: Contain yourself; quarantine your sorrow.

For the most part, I do. I have learned to edit Ben’s existence out of polite conversation so that the boss or first date won’t accidentally trip into the chasm of his absence and need me to help them back up, brushing them off with assurances that he died a long time ago, telling them it’s okay when they say they’re sorry. I’ve learned to say that I “lost” my brother or that he “passed away.” I’ve learned that no one will bring him up unless I do.

In the weeks after his accident, the stream of condolence posts on Facebook page and Instagram slowed, and then, suddenly, stopped entirely. I felt an obligation to keep his memory alive, and social media seemed like the most efficient way to do that. I started posting about him—an old photo, a saved Snapchat video. In a couple of clicks, I found that I could put Ben’s face in the minds of the people who’d known him and, even more powerfully, those he hadn’t lived long enough to meet. In a way, this felt like extending his life.

Like everything on social media, my posts about Ben are, indeed, performative. But when I share images and stories of my brother online, I can make him come up for others as he does for me—not as a sanctified tragedy but as a person embedded in the world. I love the idea of a memory of Ben showing up in some tangential connection’s feed, sandwiched between an engagement photo shoot and an ad for subscription toilet paper. I love sharing photos of him that are nothing like the black-and-white senior portrait used in his obituary or the picture-perfect Christmas-card photos printed on funeral poster boards. In my photos, Ben can be blurry and stoned and pimpled and human.

And online, Ben can still surprise me.

[Read: My mom will email me after she dies]

A few months ago, I got a call from my mother. A parent from our middle school had reached out to say that something was going on with Ben’s memorial page, but they wouldn’t say what. My mother had tried to get to the bottom of it but hadn’t found anything on the main page, and anyway, Facebook was always updating, always moving things around. Did I know what was going on?

My mother is easily scandalized but not easily deterred. Better to find out what had happened from me than from “Corey’s” splayed thighs. I took a deep breath. There’s a group chat, I explained. No one really uses it, but we all get notified when someone posts. Recently, and I don’t know how, it got spammed.

Spammed?

Yeah, with porn. We’re all being sent porn from Ben’s memorial page.

What followed was a silence so deep that it made me miss the static of landlines. Then it broke, finally, into the unmistakable crescendo of laughter. “Oh my God, he would have loved that,” my mom cackled. “That’s so Ben.”