Social media and mourning: Funerals may be the last frontier
NEW YORK >> Taya Dunn Johnson has been living large online for years, embracing Facebook, Twitter and other social streams to frequently share her most mundane and intimate moments.
Her husband — her high school sweetheart and an IT specialist — was an offline kind of guy, though he was surrounded by post-happy loved ones, colleagues and friends and had no problem with that.
Then he died suddenly of a heart attack at age 37 and his wife found herself entrenched in what just might be the last frontier for privacy, his funeral.
“I held two services and had to ask several people not to take photos of his casket,” said Johnson, a 38-year-old administrative assistant who lives in Baltimore with her 6-year-old son. “The idea of it disturbed me. Days later, I noticed several people had ‘checked-in’ from the funeral home on a couple of platforms.”
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Actively using social media as she did when tragedy struck in 2012, and as she still does, Johnson understands why Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg asked mourners, tech powerhouses included, to stay off social media from her husband David Goldberg’s memorial service Tuesday.
“It’s a slippery slope,” Johnson said. “We share everything from our new car to our meal to our new dress. Somehow those things have become interchangeable with death.”
Ann Bacciaglia, a customer support worker for a large corporation in Ottawa, was also an avid social media user when her husband of 18 years died suddenly of an undiagnosed brain cyst in 2011. He was 44.
Like Johnson’s husband, he had no interest in social streams, which didn’t keep Bacciaglia from announcing his death on Twitter. It never occurred to her to ask their loved ones to refrain from pulling out their phones at his funeral. None did.
In the year after his death, she publicly blogged about her grief and leaned even more heavily on her online followers and friends for support. Other young widows reached out, and helping them through their losses was her best medicine.
“Social media just wasn’t something my husband saw the point of, but it’s a huge part of how I grieved and continues to be very important to me,” Bacciaglia said.
Offline or on Facebook, crass is crass when it comes to funerals and memorial services, said David Ryan Polgar, a lawyer and former college professor in West Hartford, Connecticut, who blogs about tech and ethics.
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