Death and All His Friends

When we were young, my cousin and I seized any opportunity we had to toss a ball around. It was the nineties, before our obsession with internet games or online chat rooms. He was full of energy, never able to sit still. I was a tomboy who wanted to be just like him. Late one night, we were having a catch in his living room, and we knocked over a lamp, shattering its lightbulb. In an attempt to avoid the blame, my cousin taped a note to the lamp shade that read “OJ didn’t do it, Jackie did”—a nod to the never-ending news cycle at the time and an appeal to our family’s sense of humor. This made it difficult for my aunt and uncle to be angry when they woke up to the mess the next morning.

This is the story I told to a room full of people laughing through their tears at my cousin’s funeral in 2017. He had just died of a heroin overdose at twenty-four; we were the same age. I stood at an old, wobbly podium, and pretended to be somewhere else as I gave his eulogy. I had to. I had to remove myself from the stale smell of the funeral home—musty, but dry, decade-old cigarette smoke masked by new air fresheners. I had to stare through the faces of his friends, the faces of boys I’d grown up trailing on borrowed bicycles, each one now bearded, manly, full of sorrow. I had to channel a place deep inside of me, a place without football Sundays, homemade milkshakes, or the sound of his laugh. A place where memories weren’t the only thing left.

A few nights before the funeral, I sat cross-legged on my grandparents’ living room floor with the rest of my family, sorting through old photos of my cousin. I was a shell of myself, or rather, a half of myself, now that he was gone. I peered at the memory boards being formed in front of me and tried to recall the last time I saw my cousin.

I couldn’t.

Surely it was last Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve or maybe even a birthday party since then, but I couldn’t remember the last words we shared, the last time he called out my name and wrapped me in a tight hug. Though we had been inseparable all the years of our adolescence, we had broken apart bit by bit in our teens and almost completely as young adults. I had classes to take, a full-time job to find, sexuality to discover. He was falling deep and hard into drugs—promethazine and codeine first, then worse.

I shared so many memories with him in our younger years. Wiffle ball games in the side yard, Blockbuster scary movie marathons, the nights my uncle would turn off all the lights and blast “Boris the Spider” by The Who, chasing us around until we giggled so hard we couldn’t breathe. But the memories of the last few years didn’t belong to me—a fact I recognized when I stepped away from the photo boards, away from my family for a moment, and logged on to Facebook for the first time since his death.

I hardly used Facebook anymore, more inclined to posting one-off photos on Instagram or witty one-liners on Twitter. I’ve always been a fairly private person, never the type to update my status each time I go on vacation, let alone shopping. My cousin didn’t have a Facebook, but his brother showed me how many people had begun to post about him. I was starved for recent parts of him—bonds formed with other people, memories made that I knew nothing about. I clicked rapidly through his friends’ posts, devouring every word. I wanted to absorb the pieces of his life I had missed out on in recent years, no matter how reckless he might’ve been, no matter how sick.

There were dozens. Lengthy messages filled with details of shore trips, midnight adventures, inside jokes I otherwise would never have known. Grainy photos of him laughing, pictures blurred in a way that implied time was moving too fast to capture the moment in stillness. The posts became my nourishment. I consumed them as if they were my breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the days leading up to his funeral.

I stumbled across a post from his very first girlfriend. She reminisced on their first kiss, and I remembered the hours he and I spent together, perched in front of our grandparents’ old desktop computer, sending her pickup lines on AOL Instant Messenger. “If it snowed every time I thought about you, baby we’d have a blizzard,” he typed. And we laughed and laughed. When I read her words, I sobbed in a way I hadn’t yet been able to. It filled a gaping hole in my grief. Like the missing pieces of his history that were just out of reach were now suddenly accessible.

I added some of his closest friends on Facebook. I liked their posts about him, and they liked mine. It gave us a way to connect, to bond over a shared loss. Sharing stories online, listening, and understanding offered me a kind of solace I couldn’t get from the people in my real life. It didn’t matter that the stories were from strangers or from people I hadn’t seen since I was eleven or twelve. It didn’t matter that it was on a public platform. We were connected, if only through a thumbs-up on the screen.

Prior to my cousin’s overdose, I was always critical of the way people posted about death on social media. Whenever I lost someone, I might share a picture or a brief memory, but other than that, my grieving process was always as private as the rest of my life. From the outside looking in, I judged people whose posts seemed to be stretching to share a fabricated connection. I often raised an eyebrow, asking, Did they even know that person? I attempted to measure who was worthy of commemorating, who deserved to. But once I was on the inside looking out, my opinion changed.

I had lost an irreplaceable part of myself, and I knew I would never be whole again. But by refreshing and scrolling and reading as fast as my eyes could move, at least I could begin to make the memory of my cousin whole again.

***

In 2021, we as a country have reached a level of collective grief that most days seems unbearable. And though our grief is collective, it has been unsafe for us to mourn together, in person. As of May 2021, over 585,000 Americans have died as a result of COVID-19. In the midst of this deadly virus which disproportionately affects Black people and folks of color at alarming rates, we have also watched police murder an overwhelming number of Black people, as white supremacists continue to feel emboldened, making their presence even more apparent than it already was. Not only are we grieving, we are angry, we are afraid. To echo the sentiment of so many, if you aren’t angry, if you aren’t afraid, you aren’t paying attention. And yet, for over a year, we couldn’t hug our friends. We couldn’t talk about the news after work with a coworker at a bar. Most of us couldn’t risk knocking on our parents’ door to check on them, to feel their comfort in person.

In early 2021, as we approached the one-year anniversary of the start of quarantines and lockdowns across the country, many of us were forced back inside by winter weather. Forced to cut short dog-walks, to cut out morning jogs, to put pauses on gardens or catches or safe outdoor hangs. As a result, many of us turned to the internet. We found ourselves unable to escape screens, but sometimes, they offered us the comfort and community we were missing.

When numbers first began rising at alarming rates, I spent hours on Instagram, scrolling through photos of nurses and other medical professionals with indented lines pressed into their cheeks from round-the-clock mask-wearing. Behind the exhaustion in their eyes, there was fear. Still, they shared their irritated skin and disheveled hair to say: I’ve just lost another patient. Please wear your mask. Each day, they’ve been forced to bear the trauma of watching a deadly virus take lives, of loved ones saying their final goodbyes through a cell phone speaker. And though it couldn’t bring anyone back to life, though it couldn’t make ignorant deniers follow guidelines, people continually congregated below their posts to share genuine thank-yous. To say: I can’t imagine how difficult this must be for you. To remind them they are doing all they can, and for that, they are heroes.

Each week in quarantine, I came upon a new thread on Twitter by a stranger who had recently suffered through COVID-19 or who was caring for a loved one with the virus. Here are my symptoms, they’d say. Here’s what has helped. These threads struck fear in me, to hear personal accounts directly from other human beings. But above all else, I appreciated them. The rest of the internet appreciated them, showing their gratitude in retweets and likes, spreading the tweets to say: In case this could help someone. Other threads were sadder, scarier. We thought my uncle was getting better, but then the fever came back. Or: it’s been three months since I had the coronavirus and I still get out of breath from walking to the kitchen. Still, in the darker realities of the pandemic, we came to the keyboard to offer our condolences and our me toos.

In the fall, I refreshed my Facebook timeline multiple times a day, searching for updates on a former classmate’s husband. He had tested positive for the coronavirus and, as per my classmate’s statuses, seemed to be declining. Had to take him to the ER this morning because his oxygen levels were in the eighties, she wrote in one of her paragraphs. I’m not usually much of a “sharer,” but I have never needed other people more in my life. The posts were flooded with comments of well-wishes and heart emojis, friends and family reaching out of course, but acquaintances too—people her family likely hadn’t heard from in years. Her posts took a turn for the better when he eventually stabilized. There was an outpour of relief in the comments. Thank-you all so much again for all the help and prayers—they have TRULY made the difference, she wrote.

We are learning to cope in strange, new ways. We have our means of communication with our family and friends—phone calls and text messages and emails ending in “Hope you are well,” “Stay safe.” We have our Zoom calls and our Google Meets in all of their “You’re muted” glory. But there is something about connecting with strangers. There is something about grieving publicly and the responses we garner. The acknowledgment that we are alone, and we are not okay. The comfort of a shared loss, of “I know what you’re going through.” The validation of the like, the retweet, the comment, letting us know we are united in our anger, in our sadness, in our fear, albeit virtually.

Of course, social media is not therapy. It’s not a stand-in for processing the five stages of grief. It’s not antianxiety medication or an antidepressant—what so many people need, but cannot get access to. Sometimes, rather than quelling our anxieties, social media feeds them—a new phenomenon we like to call “doom scrolling” on Twitter, a result of a presidential era mired with new bad news every day. Many of us have become subconsciously accustomed to seeking out the latest turmoil, adding to our already crippling dread and frustration, creating an unhealthy cycle. It’s often just as helpful to take breaks from consuming internet posts as it is to connect through them.

But when we can use these outlets in a healthy way, to mourn together, to help one another, we can find some small semblance of hope, of connection in an otherwise dismal, isolating circumstance.

***

A few weeks after my cousin died in 2017, his brother asked me to help create a memorial page on Facebook. It was a task I never thought I’d have to execute. I wasn’t sure I’d be comfortable holding a public space for someone so close to me, for something that felt so personal. But I reflected on the solace I had found through strangers’ posts and pictures since his death and realized a memorial page might provide the same sense of solace for others. It might fill in the pieces of my cousin they were missing.

We flooded the memorial page with photos and memories and each year since, on the day of his passing, his brother posts a heartfelt message. Members of the page rush to like it and comment and it feels like everyone has a brief opportunity to come together again. To feel and to cry and to grieve with others who are doing the same.

I used to loathe the idea of publicizing death or suffering. I felt that grief was a personal process that would run its natural course with the help of therapy and real-life shoulders to cry on. The truth is, sometimes that’s not enough. Grief is a mountain of steep climbs and slippery slopes. Some people have a hard time finding their footing. Some people never make it to the other side. And isn’t it harder to climb a mountain alone, than with someone’s support?

When the coronavirus reached America in early 2020, we had absolutely no idea what was in store. Now, over a year later, though we are still unsure of what’s to come, it seems we may be headed toward a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. As we revel in the relief of vaccines, many of us are back to hugging relatives, back to planning trips to new cities, back to drinking at bars with strangers.

The number of cases reported daily is on the decline in most states, but such progress doesn’t erase the devastating reality of the 585,000 lives already lost to COVID-19 in the US.

Beyond the mountains of our personal losses, we now face a mountain of collective grief, and collective grief calls for community. Soon, we’ll be able to support one another in person, walking the trails together, patting one another on the back as we stare up at the most daunting cliffs. But for the several months during which we couldn’t, many of us turned to social media. Many of us turned to strangers and likes and retweets, if only to feel a little less alone. We learned how to survive this period of history with a little help from the corners of this strange thing we call the internet. Simply making it to the end of each day has become inconceivably difficult for many, and though social media can’t solve our personal crises or end a pandemic, it has made it a little bit easier to live through.

-Jackie Domenus

Jackie Domenus is a queer writer and educator from New Jersey. A participant of the 2021 Tin House Winter Workshop, her essays have appeared in Entropy, Watershed Review, and Philadelphia Stories. She recently earned her MA in Writing at Rowan University where she also served as Associate Editor for Glassworks Magazine. You can find her on Twitter @jackiedwrites.