Their profile is still online: grief and the feed

The morning after, their profile fills with people you have never met.

RIP. Gone too soon. Fly high. A row of broken hearts from names you do not recognise, under the last photo they ever posted.

Some of them knew your person. Some met them once. Some are just passing, moved for a moment by a stranger, and the moment is real to them, and it costs you something you cannot explain.

The grief you have to watch other people perform

There is your grief, the private, load-bearing kind. And then there is the grief happening on their page, public and fluent, in a language of hashtags and heart emojis.

People who barely knew them write long, aching tributes. People who knew them best say nothing, because there is nothing that fits in a comment box.

You scroll the tributes and you feel two things at once. Grateful that they are remembered. And strangely robbed, watching a person you carry in your bones become, for an afternoon, everyone's.

Your person is a hole in your whole life, and online they are a post that did well.

The post you are supposed to make

Then comes the question nobody asks out loud, but everyone seems to be waiting for. When are you going to post about it.

There is a script for this now. A photo of them, a caption that turns the worst thing that ever happened to you into something the feed can like and share and scroll past.

So many of you have said how strange this is. Some of you post, and it helps, and that is allowed. Some of you cannot make your grief into content, and go quiet, and then feel guilty for the silence. Neither is doing it wrong. There is no wrong.

Everyone else's ordinary Tuesday

And underneath all of it, the feed keeps going.

Holidays. Engagements. Someone's lunch. Someone's baby. A whole world of people whose ordinary Tuesday is still an ordinary Tuesday, thumbing past while yours stopped on a date you will never scroll off.

It is a strange loneliness, watching everyone else's life run on time while yours refuses to. Nobody means it. The feed just does not know.

The message you still send

So you go to their page, the way you used to go to them.

You open the little box where you would send a photo, a joke, a "call me." Their name is still there, in the same place it always sat. Sometimes you type something. Sometimes you send it.

You know they will not read it. You send it anyway, because the alternative is a version of the world where there is nowhere left to send it.

Their profile is still online. The notifications will still surface their face on ordinary mornings, and the account itself is a separate, slower thing to sort, when you are ready, and not before.

You close the app. Their page stays open somewhere, lit, waiting, in a room the internet forgot to switch off.

Questions people also ask

Should I post about my grief on social media?

There is no rule, and no schedule you owe anyone. Some people find that posting a photo and a few words helps them feel their person is still seen; others find the whole idea of turning grief into a public post unbearable, and stay quiet. Both are normal. The pressure you feel to perform your loss for other people is real, and you are allowed to ignore it.

Is it weird that I still message someone who died on social media?

No. So many grieving people keep sending messages to a page that cannot answer, a text into a thread that has gone still, a comment on an old photo. It is not denial. It is often the one place left that feels like it points toward them, and using it is a way of staying in the habit of loving them.

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