We grieve in photos and reels now. But who are we really mourning?
When a celebrity dies and social media is flooded with tributes, are we grieving the person or the version of ourselves we saw reflected through them?
When ad legend Piyush Pandey died last month, a catalogue of my interactions with him over eight years of reporting on the advertising industry resurfaced in memory. A tribute began forming in my head, almost reflexively. Then I paused to ask: Was I mourning Piyush Pandey, or memorialising the recognition he gave to my work? In the days that followed, I scrolled through social media and noticed how among the genuine outpouring of grief, many posts weren’t really about him, but about the experience of being acknowledged by him.
Grief has no rulebook, but if it did, rule No.1 would be that there’s no wrong way to mourn. Still, how has the internet shaped our grieving process, especially when we lose someone who existed in that strange space between personal and parasocial? A celebrity who knew of our existence, with whom we had multiple interactions perhaps, yet who wasn’t part of our inner world. Their death is not a personal loss, but the loss of a personality. And with it emerges this urge to tell the world how that personality saw us, furnishing proof that we had access to and were deemed worthy by someone a large section of society is mourning.
When we express grief for someone with whom we had a “peripheral relationship" rather than a “reciprocal" one, we’re doing something psychologically complex, says Meghna Mukherjee, a Noida-based psychoanalytic psychotherapist. “We have seen a vignette of this person and not seen them in their wholeness. But they are a powerful part of our world, so a lot of our unmet cherished needs are projected on to this relationship."
The urge to showcase that relationship is often a way to seek belongingness, she says. “You think if this person was kind to me, I’m worthy of kindness." It’s not just celebrities, notes Mukherjee, you could express grief this way over a professor’s death, someone you worked with on just one paper. “They made you feel things you didn’t know how to feel for yourself." But some of these posts can feel so performative, that you start to question if this is someone trying to make sense of their grief, or riding a wave? When an expression of grief begins to look like “content", it becomes hard to tell where sincerity ends and strategy begins.
What might look like narcissism is the “grammar of modern expression", says anthropologist Gayatri Sapru from Mumbai. “We are increasingly processing all parts of the world through ourselves. It’s a way of throwing an anchor out into the social sea, to declare that ‘I was here too, this mattered to me’," Sapru says. From an anthropological view, this is how loneliness is managed in modern life, through short bursts of algorithmic belonging. “To grieve publicly is to reaffirm connection itself, to make sure others realise we are still connected somehow, we are still on at least one common frequency."
In October 2023, Sage Journals published a paper titled Collective Expressions of Grief in the Digital Age, in which author Valentina Proust, a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania stated that “digital mourning has become a new way of expressing loss and grief in the digital age." She likens it to a form of activism that “aims to construct a collective identity", using examples from events like Black Lives Matter, covid-19 protests, and the Arab Spring. Given this need for algorithmic belonging, it’s perhaps not surprising that grief moves faster online when the loss isn’t deeply personal.
“Often for personal loss, some time needs to pass before you start sharing your grief with the rest of the world," says Farah Maneckshaw, a counselling psychologist from Bengaluru. “But when it’s a public figure who also had some connection to you, people tend to take to social media a lot faster. They want to make meaning of the loss, to feel connected to others grieving the same person."
Standup comedian and adman Neville Shah experienced this firsthand. He took up to a year to talk about his mother’s death in his act. His post about Piyush Pandey—who was his mentor during the decade he spent at Ogilvy—came almost instantly. It was a snapshot of an email he wrote to his current agency, paying tribute to an industry stalwart. “He didn’t just make ads. He made India talk to itself a little better. He never carried his fame like armour. He carried it lightly, like a cricketer carries his bat; with joy, with gratitude, with the readiness to play one more good innings," Shah wrote.
The difference was stark. One involved breaking down. The other almost felt like a responsibility to Shah, albeit with a personal angle. He admits feeling a tad guilty about the latter though. “I even acknowledged in my post that who am I to write about Piyush?" But he understands the emotion. No one should judge how someone chooses to grieve. Mukherjee sees potential in this expression of grief. “A breakdown like this could be a great opportunity for a breakthrough to happen," she says. “You can reflect on what’s making you feel unworthy, create processes that reverse that feeling by focusing on meeting your cherished needs through reciprocal relationships instead."
Maybe the internet hasn’t changed how we express grief as much as it has revealed what we’re actually grieving. That it’s not just the person, but the version of ourselves we saw reflected in their acknowledgment of us.
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