Grief, Online. To post or not to post, when someone dies.

“The last few years I have bought myself pink flowers, as it was Julia’s favourite colour and the colour of her hair when she died. ”

Every year I wonder if I should post something today. And every year I feel ashamed at the thought.

The normality of translating our private lives to the online sphere means public grief has taken new forms. While social media is often seen as superficial, surface level expressions of self, there are random pockets of authenticity. But how do we find them? How do we know what is in alignment with the person posting and what is just another way to craft an identity for themselves to their following?

These are the things I think about when I feel the urge to post a picture of my friend on the day she died. Or her birthday. Or anytime I want to share her face with a world that is slowly forgetting her.

I’ve heard a bunch of different perspectives on this. To post or not to post when someone dies. If you do, you’re guaranteed to be flooded with countless red heart and dove emoji combos. Many well-intentioned, “thinking of you”s. If you don’t, you get to tell people in person. When they come over and ask where your cat is, and you get to swim in a moment of grief as your guest tells you “I’m sorry.” You’re confronted with your pain by a person instead of a screen. I don’t know what option is easier. I don’t know if social media is a tool to assist with the process or just a way for hundreds of people to perform sympathy on free apps.

Julia died in 2015, a year after we graduated high school.

The girls who called her homophobic slurs behind her back immediately took to Twitter to declare their love for her and pronounce her beauty, complete with her own hashtag, #RIPJulia. I felt sick and angry but too overwhelmed to do anything. At 19, I still cared too much about what other people thought of me to tell them off. Instead I let them have their moment in the sun. Tragedy in a small town is a luxury, a limited resource that everyone wants a part of to feel self important. People need to feel like they belong, even if that means being a part of something awful. Everyone wants to grasp onto something bigger than themselves.

I worried I was falling into this trap as well, this desire to own a piece of tragedy that was not my own. I used to feel that I didn’t have a right to mourn Julia. That because we had grown further apart when she moved to Ottawa for school, because I had canceled the Skype call we were supposed to have the week before she died, because we did not talk every single day, I felt like a failure as a friend and my grief was selfish. So every post I made about her has always come tinged with worry. Am I exploiting my dead friend for my own personal gain? Am I pushing my grief onto 2,000+ friends and strangers so I can appear more interesting?  Am I still grieving her death or just milking it for likes? Is it even grief? or is it something selfish, more sinister? These anxieties have swirled around in my brain for nearly a decade now. While they still exist, my early doubts are often drowned out by the sound of Julia’s voice reminding me of the same thing she wrote in our grade 12 yearbook. “I will always have your back,” a quote now tattooed in her handwriting on my right arm, so I will never get a chance to forget it.

My therapist taught me that guilt is a distraction from grief. That it was much easier to spend the last 8 years feeling guilty than actively grieving someone I assumed would grow old alongside me. It was much easier to feel guilty, responsible even, despite her death being a tragic accident that took place 5 hours away from me. I let my brain wander into the idea that I could have saved her, instead of understanding she was gone. My guilt was a scapegoat. 

Everyone has a different journey with grief, and everyone is going to deal with it in a myriad of ways. There’s a negative connotation with “needing attention” that I used to associate with grief posting. As I get older, and less concerned with the judgment of others, I understand that I do need attention. Who doesn’t? Human beings cannot heal in isolation, we need connection and community. As much as I love to pretend I am emotionally void, I still need to be witnessed when I am hurting. After spending so many years after her death feeling too guilty to share, too upset with myself to even write about my friend, I am learning that sharing my grief online is not selfish. It is an evolution of the era we were born into. It is a tool we can use to connect with others going through the same kind of hurt so we can feel less alone.

I have slowly come to accept that every year is going to feel different.

Early July will always be heavy, with the urge to cry coming in bigger, more unexpected waves, some I cannot jump over, some I have to let wash over me and accept that while I can’t breathe for a few seconds, the air will come back. Sometimes it will be okay, and I will go about my day in silence with the memory of her more vivid in my mind when I fall asleep. Sometimes I will get another piercing because she would have had a gemstone anywhere she could by now. The last few years I have bought myself pink flowers, as it was Julia’s favourite colour and the colour of her hair when she died. She doesn’t have a gravesite to go to, so the pink bouquet serves as an excuse to visit her, to bring her vibrancy into my home again as I age without her. Maybe some years I will share this with other people, post a photo of us as kids on my Instagram so people will read her name and invite me to talk about it. Some years I will keep this date to myself as I listen to her favourite songs and remember how, after her death, her family showed me a note she had left in her gratitude jar that said “having Victoria Butler as a best friend.” And I’ll laugh, thinking she would have called me an idiot for thinking I didn’t deserve to miss her.

Victoria Butler, author, with her friend Julie before her death