Public online grieving- when does it cross the line?

In My Humble Opinion
1

About a year ago, posts started popping up on my Facebook feed from a woman with a terminally ill son, because my former stepdaughter had been liking/commenting on them. The son had a rare-for-a-child illness, and the woman used her FB page to chronicle their lives (she has a husband and daughter as well), raise awareness of the disease, and share “normal” day to day things. I’d read the posts if I was so inclined that day, but usually I skipped over them.

Her son died six months ago. She doesn’t go into detail, but apparently it was not an easy death. She clearly carries a lot of guilt and trauma over whatever happened at the hospital.

In the weeks following, her posts were… well, what you would expect from a grieving mother who just lost their 13 year old son. Lot of anger, lot of questioning of her faith, lot of “how can I go on,” lot of heartbreak over everything her son had, and now will, missed out on. She seems to have a great support system IRL and online- family, friends, community members (especially at her daughter’s school), church, and a huge following of online people who came to her page through a variety of means.

As we got to the six month mark, her posts became… darker. The other day she posted “Each day I ask God to come take us” (her, husband, daughter) and it just raised the hair on the back of my neck. She doesn’t say anything about any kind of counseling she is attending, she calls her family broken, and everything she posts indicates a deep, deep, DEEP depression. She apparently snapped at her daughter (who’s 10) the other day, and has not been kind in her descriptions of her thoughts of her husband.

Her daughter can see these posts. Her husband. Family, friends, strangers. It’s all out there, ugly and raw and terrifying, and all I can think is “WHY HASN’T ANYONE TAKEN THIS WOMAN BODILY TO A COUNSELOR???”

I know as a society we tend to not be good at handling the grief of others. I’m a counselor by trade, with hospice experience, so I get it. But this new form of public grieving, where your child or their friends can go online and see that mom wants the family dead, is just mind-boggling. These are things you howl into the darkness, or share with the closest of friends- you don’t toss them out there for the vultures of the world to pick at.

Am I being overly critical? What benefit am I missing?

2

It crosses the line when she posts a desire for her child and husband to die. Otherwise it’s nobody’s business how people choose to grieve.

3

She obviously needs help, and the major problem is that she feels this way, not that she’s sharing her feelings publicly.

4

There is a “friend-of-a-friend” similarly on FB, a single guy in his 40’s who lost his dog of about 14 years about 2 years ago. This guy can’t stop grieving over the loss of his dog. And he even brings it up randomly making comments in other people’s posts, like a picture of a kids birthday party and their family dog is in the background. I don’t know the guy but he seriously needs some help.

5

My niece (ex-wife’s niece) had a very premature birth and the baby (it could barely qualify as a baby) died after 45 minutes. It’s been over a year and periodically I see her post her dead baby picture. She constantly talks about being a mother. She needs help but her mother feeds into it (starting with pressuring her to keep the baby to begin with while still in high school). She snaps at anyone who suggests moving on with her life and not having her grief be the central part of her being. Basically she was a kid who can’t handle it and no one is helping. I’m too far on the outside to do anything. With her I feel the same way as the OP.

6

This, and holy fuck she needs intervention if she is posting about committing harm to her children and husband. This is not healthy grief, it sounds like severe mental illness and if she is posting publicly it means she is desperate for help.

I think it’s pretty unfair to expect people to have a timeline for grief. A former Doper (or maybe she still lurks) who is a good friend of mine lost her husband to cancer, and she took it very hard. She slipped into a deep depression. What I saw was people telling her, in essence, ‘‘It’s time to move on,’’ her becoming more withdrawn and alienated from people as a result, thus making healing even harder. What I learned from her is, you don’t push people along your own personal grief timeline. You just be there for them. Often the whole ‘‘you should move on’’ reaction is essentially saying, ‘‘You should move on because I feel uncomfortable.’’

If that grief becomes something serious enough to significantly destabilize a person’s life (i.e. can’t work), or the resulting depression threatens harm to self or others, then intervention is a good idea. Grief might trigger clinical depression but they are two different things. Let the grief work itself out, treat the depression.

7

The traditional solution to this is to get another dog.

8

If your former stepdaughter actually knows the woman, since you’re a counselor, can you talk to her about approaching the woman and intervening?

That poor woman and her poor family. What a mess. They all need counseling. :frowning:

9

I think that a small degree can be healthy and therapeutic, but yeah, I’d highly recommend intervening in some form or fashion in the OP’s instance. I’m concerned that she might try to bring harm to the entire family - via poisoning or some other method.

One of my classmates passed away due to cancer a few years ago, and throughout her treatment, there was a Facebook page (group?) devoted to chronicling her fight, victories and imminent defeat. It was especially sad because she looked to be beating it, when she took a fatal turn for the worse in 24 hours. I never knew the husband, but he kept the group going, posting photos of their children. Still, now and then, he’ll post something, and it’s a nice reminder of her life and it’s good to know that the family appears to be doing well.

A former teammate (one year older than me) passed away some years ago, and his brother (my age) took it really hard. For the next year or so, it wouldn’t be uncommon to see that the brother would post on his deceased sibling’s Facebook page. Statements like “I miss you” or “It was mom and dad’s anniversary today, and it doesn’t seem fair that you aren’t here to celebrate.” I found it slightly odd that he was doing so in a public forum like that, but if it helped him cope, then I didn’t see how it would be detrimental.

BUT, one of the features of Facebook is that it will let you know when it’s a friend’s birthday, and prompt you to post public well-wishes and whatnot. More than a few people were either unaware that he’d passed, or forgot, and his Facebook page was full of “Happy birthday! We need to hang out!”, “I’ll be in town later this month, if you’re free!”, and “What have you been up to?!?!”

From what I heard, this really hurt / affected the brother. It was a mix of experiencing the loss anew, and he was upset to realize that not everyone remembered his brother’s passing. The Facebook page was subsequently deleted within a month.

10

That’s so sad, Calatin.

Social media can make deaths really weird. I got to know my great uncle a bit online before his passing from cancer, and we were Facebook friends. After he died, his wife kept making personal posts with his profile. Like, she would respond to something innocuous using his Facebook name and profile photo. So it looked like my Uncle John saying, ‘‘I have this great recipe for banana bread!’’ or whatever. It was really disconcerting.

11

A gentleman I worked with died in a car accident a few years back; some member of the family had access to his FB account and would post as him. Like, “Dancing in heaven with (wife who also died in a car accident several years beforehand)!” and “Arrived in heaven, it’s beautiful here!” It was just BIZARRE. Finally other members of the family and some friends kind of lost their heads over it, it caused a comment war, and the posts stopped.

The former Mr Kitty died a bit over five years ago; his FB is still active and his kids and some other friends/family will comment on it now and then or tag him in old photos. It’s much healthier.

Spice Weasel, I really love this: “Let the grief work itself out, treat the depression.” I don’t want to interfere in her ability to grieve however she needs, and I wouldn’t ever presume to envision how that would look for her, but there’s much more going on here.

Helena330, that’s a really good idea. I might look into that.

12

When my grandma died last year one of my aunts started doing that immediately afterward, and it was very uncomfortable. When she started responding to well-wishes and “we should get together soon, I’ll be in town!” as my grandma I quietly looked into turning her page into a memorial. I’m glad it’s a feature that’s easily accessed if you have the data to do it.

I’m not sure when public grieving becomes too much, but I can’t agree with the idea that how anyone chooses to grieve is nobody else’s business. If you’re doing it publicly it forces others to participate in your grieving process and it becomes their business. I’m all for encouraging people to just be supportive and let the process take as long as it takes, but the OP’s experience at the very least crosses the line into too much and that family needs help to get through it.

13

I’m disappointed that we disagree, but I’m even more disappointed that you’re not a platypus. :frowning:

14

Me too, every day.

To be clear with the on-topic stuff, I just don’t know how to handle other people’s grief or other intensely personal things (hurray being raised in a super-reserved non-expressive family), so for me it’s all too much info and I want to be helpful but the best I can do is keep my mouth shut and let people do what they need to. The last thing I want to do is make their struggle worse. I really do think we should be more encouraging of letting people grieve as long as they need to and being supportive of that. I just… don’t know how to.

15

No one is being forced to follow this person’s social media activity.

16

No one is being forced to follow it, but do those who are-particularly those close to the family IRL- have some level of responsibility to step in when things start going off the rails? And where is that line? She had a lengthy post about how it’s no one’s business whether she’s in counseling or not, and her page is where she talks about her son so screw everyone’s opinions, and everyone who responded applauded her. Two days later she posted about how 300 people went to her son’s funeral but now everyone is living their own lives and no one reaches out to her to share stories about her son and be with her in her grief. She bitched about her children’s friends not calling/visiting her to talk about the memories they have about her dead son, and when someone pointed out that they visited regularly and kids just grieve differently, that person was cursed at and their posts deleted.

Do those who choose to follow her also have to cheer on everything she puts out there, even if it’s potentially hurtful to her daughter and husband? Her mother-in-law is a follower of the page, and consistently one of the first to defend everything that’s said. It shocks me that she lets things like “I pray every day that God takes us all” slide.

17

Well, probably; Facebook does odd things when it comes to sharing, like showing you posts from non-friends because you messaged them in the last month (to arrange a lift share, to state a current annoying example from my page), or because you have friends who’ve replied to their posts.

The oddest Facebook example featuring dead people I’ve come across was the event invite I received from a guy I’d never actually met, because he’s died shortly before I moved to the area, which was several years earlier.

There was no mention of it being a memorial event, and nothing on his page to indicate that he was dead. A group of people (who I do know) had obviously got access to his page, and decided to keep his name involved in organising any future events he probably would have been interested in.

It all felt pretty creepy, especially as it was someone I never even met.

18

Right you can just cut off close family members and that will have no repercussions at all. And it’s not like anyone actually cares or is concerned about their family member or friend.

19

Right after my husband died in November and for several months going forward, I used my Facebook page to sort of deal with some of my grief. I probably only did it a handful of times, but I consciously became aware that it was somehow becoming not as okay as time passed.

Initially, it helped a lot, talking through whatever event it was (like Christmas) or sharing how much I missed having him there for my birthday or what he’d do during Valentines / first day of the MLB season / whatever. And people were hugely supportive from the get go. Then I noticed my rambling about him garnered fewer and fewer comments, then the last couple, mostly just likes (or sad faces or you know).

Then that’s when it hit me squarely that they’d moved on completely and rightly so. My frequency was sporadic anyway, to say the least, and not super crucial to my coping and healing anyway, so I dropped it entirely. It wasn’t helping me as much as I hoped and I now realize that it was probably making others uncomfortable. Or maybe just bored.

Regardless, I’m relating all this to that I do that you can convince yourself that what you’re doing with your grief is a good idea to help you deal, when in reality, I think it can get you more stuck. For example, the first holidays after his death, I gave myself gifts from him to me for whichever one it was. I thought it would make me feel better and closer to him, and to ease the loss a tiny bit. Instead, it just came across as forced and stupid. After I tried the same in reverse, wrapping presents for him for me to open, I abandoned the farce entirely. I would never rag on others for doing so, especially if it works, but that’s just one thing that exemplifies how I got off track and made things worse.

Counseling anyone on this is obviously very tricky, but I do believe there comes points where it might be beneficial enough to take the risk. Another anecdote from my own life is a lady that lives down the road. She lost her husband three months before me and, according to her mother (and how she acts when I see her), she hasn’t hardly been able to heal at all. Not an ounce of therapy or a support group type situation, hasn’t re-established anything like friends or hobbies outside her work routine, and steadfastly refuses anything her loved ones might suggest to help her (activities or church or what-have-you).

It’s sad because all she’s got is anger and pain and fear. What happens to her when this lasts for multiple years, like when her first husband died? Her parents are elderly now and there may not be anyone else to pick up the pieces decades down the road when she still can’t do it herself. It just kills me. :frowning:

So, in my humble opinion, there are acceptable outer limits to grieving. Even in the support group I’ve attended, they have a whole section on “being stuck.” It’s usually quite far off from when someone died, but they caution that if you are never moving forward and your hurt turns into more of a ‘shrine’ behavior than a healthy working through of the process, that’s when there probably is a problem. I think the woman in the OP sounds like she may fit that definition. Definitely if she’d rather everyone be dead than go on.

And how heartbreaking is it when you can’t find any way past grief, yet you still have more children at home that need you? That’s the worst part of the above scenario. Her poor daughter.

20

Excellent post, faithfool. It’s always so helpful to have the insight of people who have gone through it.

Is this new behavior, or has she kind of always been like this? It sounds kind of insufferable, to be honest. It’s one thing to reach out in pain and another thing to attack and villify others.