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Are there emojis for grief? How to respond online to someone’s loss
- Most people who post about their grief on social media aren’t looking for something specific. They just want their pain witnessed
- It’s difficult to know how to respond online; experts say it depends on the level of your connection to the person
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Why you can trust SCMP
Grief is everywhere. It always has been, but before social media it was easier to pretend it wasn’t. Open Facebook, Instagram or TikTok now and the suffering is omnipresent – the loved one who died of Covid-19, the unwelcome health diagnosis, the fetus that never bloomed.
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Expressions of online grief proliferated during the pandemic – some people are lamenting monotony, some are unpacking traumatic loss. The suffering are posting with the hope of connection. But do the people reading the posts know how to provide it?
“With social media, and with all of the cascading losses of the pandemic, loss is everywhere, and you can’t close your eyes to it. But I don’t think it’s made us better at grief,” says Megan Devine, a psychotherapist and author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK.
“Cheering somebody up, looking on the bright side, practising gratitude, all that stuff doesn’t work. But we don’t really yet have a vocabulary of what to do instead. There’s this real sense of helplessness.”
Experts in grief and technology say social media has widened people’s social groups and their exposure to grief, but that hasn’t necessarily made them more comfortable with witnessing and responding to it.
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