Grieving for Likes

On the father who posted about his dying son, and the judgment we hand out to public grief

Last week I read a post from a father whose son had just died. He opened with, “I don’t know how else to grieve, so I’m here on Facebook posting this.” And then he told us about his son. The years, the laugh, the last conversation he wished had gone differently. Strangers moved through his comment section the way people move through a funeral home they’ve never been to before, unsure where to stand, but standing there anyway. Some left hearts. Some left prayers. A few told him he wasn’t alone, and for a moment, in that strange glowing room we call the internet, he wasn’t.

I sat with that until I passed out that night. Not the eulogy that followed it, but the confession that came first. “I don’t know how else to grieve.” Because I don’t think he meant he lacked imagination. I think he meant nobody ever showed him another room to walk into.

We don’t teach grief. Not really. We teach etiquette around it, sympathy cards and casserole dishes and the right amount of time to wait before you ask someone how they’re really doing. But the actual practice, the daily labor of carrying loss, nobody hands you a map for that. So when it arrives, when it’s three in the morning and your chest won’t unclench, you reach for whatever is already in your hand. And these days, for most of us, that’s a phone. A blank status box that asks what’s on your mind.

So let me say this plainly, because I think it needs saying plainly: there is nothing wrong with grieving on Facebook. Posting through it is not lesser than praying through it or writing through it. If that public square is the only altar you know, you are allowed to leave your offering there. I’ve watched people find real tenderness in those comment sections, people who showed up at 2 a.m. with nothing to offer but their presence, which, it turns out, is not nothing at all. Community can happen anywhere two people agree to be honest with each other, even in a place built to sell them things.

But I want you to know it’s not the only altar. It’s just the one closest to your hand.

There’s another kind of grieving that happens in a notebook nobody else will read, where you write to the person instead of about them. Not a status update. A letter. Tell them what you didn’t get to say, or say again the thing you already said a hundred times, because grief doesn’t care about repetition, it circles the same three sentences for years and that’s not a failure, that’s just how the body processes something this large. You don’t need an audience for that kind of honesty. Sometimes the absence of one is what lets the truest sentence out.

There’s the version of grieving that happens with your hands. Cooking the meal they used to make, badly at first, getting it a little more right each time, until one day you can make it in your sleep and it tastes like a conversation you’re still having with them. Sorting through their closet, not to purge it, just to touch what they touched, to sit on the floor with an ugly sweater in your lap and let yourself be exactly as undone as you are.

There’s the kind that happens outside, walking with no destination, just moving your body through the world the way theirs used to move through it, letting the weather do whatever it’s going to do to your face. Grief likes motion. It likes trees. It doesn’t always need words at all.

There’s the kind that happens on the phone, not the internet, the actual phone, calling someone who loved them too and just saying their name out loud together. Not to update anyone. Just to hear the name in another voice, to confirm you didn’t invent them, that they were real, that someone else remembers the sound of their laugh.

There’s the kind that happens in silence, five minutes of sitting with your eyes closed and doing nothing but noticing what’s true in your body right now, the tightness, the heat behind your eyes, the way your breath catches on inhale. That’s a practice too. It doesn’t require anyone to see it to count.

None of these are better than the father’s post. I want to be clear about that. They’re just other rooms in the same house. And most of us have only ever been shown the one with the front door propped open to the whole world, the one that comes with likes and hearts and a running tally of who noticed. There’s a kind of comfort in that visibility, and also a kind of exhaustion, because grief performed in public still has to be managed in public, still has to account for who’s watching, even when you didn’t ask to be seen.

So if you’re the person who doesn’t know another way, who reaches for the status box because it’s the only door you’ve ever had, I’m not telling you to close it. I’m telling you there are more doors than you think, and none of them require an audience, a caption, or an explanation. Some of them only require you, alone, willing to feel what you feel without narrating it to anyone.

The father’s son is gone. That won’t change, no matter which room he grieves in. But I hope somebody in that comment section, or somewhere in his life, eventually hands him a second map. Not instead of the first one. Alongside it. Because grief is not a single practice. It’s a collection of small, private technologies we build over a lifetime, and most of us are only handed one, when we deserved a whole set.

You get to build more than one. You get to grieve in rooms nobody else will ever see.

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