Performative Grief Drives Me Absolutely Insane

I’ve known people in my respective work, school, or other communities who have died recently. Two colleagues I worked very closely with died in the past year. It is very tragic, but I’ve never been the closest person to them. I wouldn’t have considered them in my circle of close friends.

And so I never felt like it was appropriate to make a social media post or grieve too publicly. I’ve never been one to show my emotions of grief that publicly (even if I write publicly about it), but I have not had close friends or immediate family die yet. As such, I contacted a couple friends and talked to my therapist about how sad I was the person died. I attended the funeral services.

But making a social media post never crossed my mind. I may have shared something I saw with no caption. But I wouldn’t pretend to have been like family or best friends with the person because I was not.

It’s not that I don’t mourn these friends, colleagues, and classmates. I don’t want to seem insensitive by seeming like I’m just going about my life on social media.

In these situations where those who passed far too soon weren’t my closest friends or weren’t family, I just don’t think it’s my place.

. . .

And so it perplexes me to recently see a phenomenon I would like to call “performative grief.” I’m not the first person to call it that, but I did think about the term prior to Googling it, so I thought about the intersections between performative allyship in social justice movements and applied it to grief.

Hannah Seligson at the New York Times interviewed Zoe Feldman, who runs a popular grief Tumblr Blog named Lisa Frank Mixtape. Feldman shares an anecdote about a girlfriend and former roommate who died. After the friend died, she saw another friend who posted on Facebook speculating about how the friend died and mourning very publicly about her girlfriend. The person speculated about how her girlfriend had died, which greatly upset the friend’s mother, leading to crisis management on Feldman’s behalf.

I see this in my own life as well. A couple months ago, a friend passed away of a health complication, far too young and far too prematurely. I got word from another person in the friend group and gave my condolences to the family.

Before I could even give my condolences, I scrolled through my Facebook feed to see that another person in the friend group posted on Facebook about how she won the battle, is in Heaven, and is rejoicing in the Lord (we’re all Christian).

That was fine, but more disconcerting was the fact that this friend and the one who had passed did not get along in real life. They had constant arguments and disagreements. At some point, they worked together and they had multiple falling outs because the friend was the supervisor, and the friend who had passed was an employee she had written up and treated very poorly on numerous occasions.

I’m not here to moralize or say who was right in the work situation, but the fact is they did not get along at all. I’m not saying they perhaps never mended their relationship or that you could be close with someone and have a lot of fallouts and a terrible working relationship with them. Life is very complicated.

But it was the nature of the Facebook posts that was disconcerting. The friend acted like they were best friends, like they always got along, and made a huge photo montage of the other person and any photos they had together.

I did wonder whether I misgauged their relationship or whether my gut was wrong. I wondered whether people who had screaming matches at each other and constantly talked poorly about each other behind each other’s backs could have been best friends without my knowledge. It’s very possible — there are more dysfunctional relationships in the world than that.

But it felt extremely performative, almost like the grieving and mourning friend was trying to gain clout on social media through her public displays and posts. It felt like a kind of signaling — that this grieving friend knew how to honor the dead and wanted to give the appearance that the two were best friends.

Meanwhile, I quietly donated to a fundraiser the son of the departed raised, sent a note of my condolences to the family, watched the funeral on the church website because I was out of town, but largely kept my mouth shut in public— because it was not my place.

. . .

I’ve seen this performative grieving phenomenon more and more as more people are online and on social media.

And it’s important to note that as grief and the Internet intersect, there are pros as well as cons. According to Seligman, on the death anniversaries of some loved ones, having the support of a whole community is very helpful. And the social media and Internet aspect around grief helps break the stigma around what has often been seen as a taboo issue in society.

When I was in a stage of intense grief about something in my personal life, anyone who reached out to express their support or condolences was helpful. I felt like I was on an island, completely alone, like people would rather pretend like the traumatic event in my life never happened and would rather put their heads down and move on rather than talk about it or acknowledge it.

“Everyone grieves in different ways,” my high school physics teacher once said. Some like to do so publicly, while others do so in private.

And it’s important to note that different cultures have different customs around grief, as well. This kind of performative grieving may be more common in some cultures than others.

And I didn’t learn the lesson that it’s not your place to publicly grieve someone you weren’t super close with that easily. In college, I did a journalistic piece about the grieving process of classmates and friends of two students at the school who died tragically in a manner that was covered by multiple high-profile media outlets.

It was something I wanted to cover because I thought it was essential to break the stigma around grief at the time — but I was very wrong. I was not close to the situation. I interviewed a couple of people, but the vast majority either did not want to talk publicly to be interviewed or would only speak to me under the condition of anonymity. I wrote it, and my professor said I should submit it for publication.

I never did. I felt guilty for inadvertently crossing boundaries when it wasn’t my place. You can say I was just doing my job on a student journalist assignment, but if that’s what it means to be a journalist on a super sensitive issue, then I didn’t want to be one. My university lit a candle and held a moment of silence for the two students at our graduation, an act that I overheard had really hurt some of the students who were closest to the two students who had passed.

I learned to be super sensitive to the grieving and not insert myself into situations where it wasn’t my place.

While I sit here to criticize people who publicly grieve the departed for personal gain and clout, you can argue I did the same once upon a time for writing that piece.

My intentions were to break the stigma of silence around grief, but it became clear to me that it’s only appropriate for a select amount of people to do that.

You might disagree, but I did learn my lesson, and vowed to never cross those lines when it wasn’t appropriate for me to do so again.

But Seligman notes that a lot of people don’t think the Internet and social media are the best places for grief, and I wholeheartedly agree. Just as people perform on social media about their accomplishments and acts of service, it was inevitable that some would also perform around grief.

It can be very hurtful to the grieving for a plethora of reasons, but it’s important to note that we can tilt the pendulum around the stigma of grief without crossing those boundaries.

At the end of the day, grief is messy, delicate, and sensitive. It will take time for us to adapt, but for the time being, I think we need to calibrate as a society.

—

This post was previously published on Invisible Illness.

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