This paper presents draws on
interviews with individuals who have experience of creating, maintaining and
utilising Facebook sites in memory of a loved one who has died by suicide. We
argue that Facebook enables the deceased to be an on-going active presence in
the lives of the bereaved. We highlight the potential of the Internet (and
Facebook in particular) as a new and emerging avenue for the continuation of
online identities and continuing bonds. Our study offers unique insight into
survivors’ experiences of engaging with the virtual presence of their deceased
loved one: how mourners come and go online, how this evolves over time and how
the online identity of the deceased evolves even after death. We discuss how
Facebook provides new ways for people to experience and negotiate death by
suicide and to memorialise the deceased, highlighting the positive impact of
this for survivors’ mental health. Finally, we describe the creation of tension
amongst those who manage their grief in different ways.
…Our participants highlighted tensions between public and
private expressions of grief and emphasised a growing sense of uneasiness
created by these new forms of memorialising/mourning between some who want
those online connections and others who wish to disengage with the
possibilities that the online environment offers. For example, those who wish
to disengage may be motivated by a desire for private grief, and the fact that
forgetting can allow wounds to heal. This process is thwarted by pervasive
digital memory (Mayer-Schonberger, 2009), and constant reminders on Facebook, and
is experienced as painful as in Lucinda’s son’s case: ‘and it’s like a pain,
it’s a painful memory’. Those who wish to engage with the online environment
may be motivated by a desire for connectedness and lament the loss of public
expressions (or ‘forgetting’) as Samantha does (‘have people forgotten … don’t
people care … I feel very alone’). The pain of grief is here intensified by the
loss of watching others withdraw from public to more private expressions of
grief, or else ‘move on’ with their lives. In both instances, the retreat from
a public sharing of grief served to isolate these participants, further
compounding their grief experience.
For Walter (2015) potential for conflict can also arise as
different ways of mourning become more apparent to others, but not necessarily
more understood. In this extract, Philip expresses a need to mourn the death of
his son with others, and honour him in a shared social space online: ‘I’ll
never take it down …. I’ve got sixty-seven people in his life who I can share
my grief with … and they all understand where I’m coming from.’ Others in his
family did not. He struggled to understand this: ‘I think [they] grieve in a
different way …. I can’t really understand how [they] can carry on as if
nothing has ever happened.’
The Internet and Facebook in particular can
therefore serve to widen the range of practices through which people grieve and
choose to ‘remember’ those who have died by suicide. Briany explained how her
grief was eased by Facebook demonstrating the enhanced affordances of online
life for ‘keeping the dead alive’. At the same time, she acknowledges the
opposite effect that reminders and memories on Facebook has had on her parent:
‘Ironically … my mum, she won’t go on the page because of that, she can’t bear
to look at a photograph of him … so there’s the flipside’.
These tensions between those who refuse to forget
and those with a desire to forget illustrate problems presented by Facebook.
However, Rosenblatt’s (1983) work is helpful in reminding us not to confuse
forgetting with being unable to confront pain. Thus, the fact that ‘she can’t
bear to look at a photograph of him’ may indicate that she simply cannot bear
the pain of something as direct as Facebook: perhaps she is at a point where
the pain is still too raw for images to offer comfort and that the Facebook
postself is too confronting. Grief itself is not a constant state and is often
individually negotiated, coming in surges which are typically set off by
reminders, especially reminders of the loss which have not yet been neutralised
or redefined (Rosenblatt, 1983). This is more likely when Facebook
expands the spatial, temporal and social reach of death (Brubaker et al., 2013). This is especially true of suicide
deaths where the process of making sense of the death is more complex (Bell et
al., 2012; Jordan, 2001) and therefore
more difficult to ‘neutralise’ and ‘redefine’…
Full article at: http://goo.gl/DTcH2G
By:
aSchool
of Social Sciences, The University of Hull, Hull, UK
bHull
York Medical School, The University of Hull, Hull, UK
cDepartment
of English, The University of Hull, Hull, UK
Correspondence: E-mail: ku.ca.lluh@lleb.j
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