Good Grief Episode Six: Facebook
At the beginning of 2018 I lost my mom to a very brief but brutal fight with lung cancer, she was 57, and no one (no one) saw it coming.
I began journaling my personal experience with grief, and eventually turned those journals into a podcast. The following is a transcript of my sixth episode. I hope this is helpful to you, because it truly has been for me.
From what I’ve learned, this process can be excruciatingly painful alone, but I think if we take the time to share our stories and lend our ears we can walk away with some Good Grief.
This week’s theme?
Rushing to the gym in a late-summer LA feaver in 2008, in the small window I had between community college classes and my closing shift as a waiter in Beverly Hills, I missed call from my ex-girlfriend’s sister Erica. — she and I had never really been friendly — one of those awkward hostility hangovers from our terribly cliche competition over her sister’s attention when we were kids. Her calling me was a little unsettling actually. I hastily checked her voicemail as I sped through yellow lights — her voice sounded thin and small and urgent — she told me to call her immediately.
Her sister, Kirsten, was supposed to be back in town from a national tour researching alternative anarchistic economies for a project she was working on — we were close, we dated long distance throughout high school driving 120 miles round trip every weekend to see eachother, we backpacked across Europe together, and broke each other’s hearts too many times to count — growing up we’d had many firsts together and there was a part of me that held on to the idea that we’d have some lasts together as well.

We’d made several failed attempts at a grown up relationship but we couldn’t find a way to make the kid gloves fit again, we’d resigned to move on and both of us were in pretty serious relationships. She’d been trying to convince me to drive her from LA to SF for the final stretch of her tour. I assumed that Erica might have wanted to join or maybe coordinate a welcome party for her.
I thought a call back could wait.
Running into the gym, I carelessly left my phone on the seat of my rotted out Nissan pickup to be stolen moments later.
Erica’s voice haunted me while I quickly moved from machine to machine, and when I got back to find my cab door open and my stuff scattered like buckshot, my stomach sank. When I got home, I had the novel idea to check MySpace to see if I could write her a message. I checked Kirsten’s page first and saw a dozen of posts — friends and family, dumping their condolences and grief on the internet. She’d been found murdered in cold blood on the streets of the 9th ward in New Orleans.
Her murderer got away, there was hardly any evidence to go on and the police weren’t particularly motivated to solve this case given the state of post-katrina New Orleans.
At that moment, sitting in my apartment doubled over in tears, rereading the posts and refreshing the page, I remember thinking what a shattering blow this all must be to the hubris of technologists — that we have at the same time created the most efficient way to communicate the most information to the most amount of people, and the loneliest possible way to receive it.
I was gutted, not sure what to do I went to work my shift. At some point my mom and step dad walked into my restaurant and practically pulled me off the floor. They’d been trying to get ahold of me, and finally decided to drive across the city and tell me that I was in shock and I needed to go home. Like many high school sweethearts, our moms were close, bonded by the mutual trauma of watching your babies turn into lovers together — and when Kirsten passed, my mom was determined to be there for her, and until my mom passed away 9 years later, they communicated regularly.
After Kirsten’s wake we sat on plastic folding chairs and sipped on paper dixie cups in someone’s backyard. And while the intention of activities like these is to bring people together, it also creates a unique scenario where the strongest through line we all share, the reason we are standing around this rubbermaid table covered in a Safeway deli trays — is gone, and for most of us it is the only thing we have to talk about — and it just makes their absence amplify, the way a single note played after seconds of silence sounds deafening.
The average person spends about 2 hours a day on social media platforms, that’s over 5 years of your life spent scrolling, liking, creeping and loling. That’s about 5 times the amount of time you will spend looking at yourself in the mirror over the course of your life. While not technically included in the DSM 5, social media addiction or dependency has been correlated to a number of psychological problems, including anxiety, depression, loneliness and ADHD.
Real talk; spend 15 minutes with me and I’ll likely have checked my phone at least 3 times — not proud, that’s just where I’m at, y’all.
There is this famous study by Canadian psychologist Bruce K Alexander about addiction from the late 70s. Up until his experiment the popular war-on-drugs era perception of drug addiction was drugs caused drug addiction. That once someone was exposed to an addictive substance, their ability to govern their own will was overrun with a ravenous, insatiable hunger for their next fix.
This theory was frequently validated by studies in which rats were placed in an empty cage and and given an unlimited supply of opiate-infused water. The rats predictably would consume the drug until they overdosed and died. Alexander saw a major flaw in this study — loneliness. Perhaps the rat’s addiction was just as much a product of its isolation as it was the result of the morphine elixir in the corner.
He recreated this experiment, but instead of leaving the rat alone in solitary confinement, he built a rat utopia with fun things to do, foods to eat and perhaps most importantly, other rats to interact with. The result was that Rat Park rats hardly consumed the morphine-laced water. This lead to a more holistic perception of addiction treatment that emphasized the importance of creating strong social bonds and finding purpose and meaning (super easy, right?). Managing a social media addiction is tricky because after a while the intimacy you experience from online interactions can begin to feel as satisfying as in person, human contact -the methadone to the heroine of face to face reality.
My grandfather’s health has been in decline for the past 4 years, and before my mom passed, she, being the natural born producer that she was, project managed his health care. My grandparents (in their late 80s and early 90’s) still live on a farm in a very rural part of Arkansas — off a dirt road off a dirt road — with little access to the luxuries of city living — no cell service, no wifi. In an attempt to keep them on their farm for as long as possible (their wishes), my mom managed a year-round schedule of rotating family members doing short residencies on the Farm. When you’re there, your days revolve around preparing, eating and cleaning up after meals — for humans as well as chickens, cows and the small army of cats that people dump out in the country and my grandma collects like rare Jordans. When you’re not busy with that, there is a running list of one off chores:

- Clear a path through grandma’s garden
- Cut your grandfather’s hair (I was the only person he would let do this for a time).
- Dig up the 200 year-old 500lb rusted backhoe that is now home to many families of tiny creatures etc.
You spend your time providing value for these people, even if it’s just making your grandmother laugh by pretending you can lip read what her cows are saying — you are appreciated and needed in a unique and extraordinary way. As you make the 3-hour drive back to Little Rock and your phone lights up with notifications again, thumb scrolling and double tapping feel embarrassingly petty. You kind of feel like your leaving Rat Park for a small bottle in the corner by yourself.
Coming back to reality for my mom — scheduling photo shoots, hustling for new clients, hating Donald Trump — was uneasy after a week out there. There was always an item or two on the checklist that she didn’t get to. She’d call me and immediately start dictating the status of the farm project, how many cats now, is grandma lonely, grandpa wants you to make him fried okra next time you’re here -
See we have an economy of attention, and social media is a fiercely competitive commodity — when it’s removed our appetites are fed by real human interaction — which is so much more potent but also more complicated, time consuming and messy. One of the last notes my mom wrote to me were the words “Project Manager,” she pointed to me, then circled the room with her finger — she needed to pass this job on to the next producer.
In April of 2018, Facebook Founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerburg stood before the US Senate in hopes to make amends for allowing groups like Cambridge Analytica to manipulate their platform in a way that could have greatly impacted the 2016 presidential election.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the Zuckerberg hearings were how little foresight he had when he first invented the platform in his dorm room in 14 years ago as a way to rate coeds based on their physical attractiveness.
Here is a pretty good example:
In 2009 Facebook had to solve the rapidly increasing problem of how to manage the accounts of its desist users. Facebook’s friend suggestions would recommend that you connect with a deceased person’s account, or worse people would troll the account writing insensitive jokes without any sort of admin to pull in the reins. In response, Facebook introduced memorialized accounts — these digital tombstones don’t appear in ads, birthday reminders or as suggestions for People You May Know.
If you’d like a memorialized account when you pass, you can add a Legacy Contact to your information and that person will be in charge of managing the basics of this page, but will not have access to any sensitive information like your personal messages.
Here is why this is important — it’s estimated that 10,000 FB users die everyday. Currently of Facebook’s 2.3 Billion users, 30 Million of those accounts are of deceased people. And by some estimates the number of dead FB accounts will outnumber the living as soon as 2065.
Emotionally, making my mom’s death Facebook official was not as simple as toggling a digital switch into the ether.
In the ICU, your world becomes very small. Everything little thing you do feels like it could shatter the delicate harmony of cables and chords, of the rise and fall of the resporator, the beeping of machines — the cadence that dictates a symphony of survival. Your entire life happens in this little cubby, around a bed in some high rise building in Glendale. The very few people the hospital will allow in the room with you, they are your fellow citizens, you make decisions for eachother, you tell each other when to eat, who should sleep.
When it ends, and you leave the hospital for the last time, not to get coffee or another pad of paper for your mom to write notes to you on — when it is over, everything feels uncomfortably still, like walking on land with sea legs after a long trip away. It feels like you’ve just left fight club, like the volume gets turned down on everything in your life.
What you just experienced was both beautifully and traumatically intimate, no one was looking at their phones in the hospital because the the crude dopamine rush you experience when your social media identity is validated is pretty vapid when pitted against the social bonds shared with your comrades in there.
Now, inevitably you have to post something — and therein lies the paradox of the age we live in (and the paradox of the success of this podcast actually). Facebook’s algorithm favors frenzy and tragedy, it rewards posts that keep you on the platform, each interaction a new data point validating its relevance. This post will be one you’d rather not be reminded of — it will hurt to look at the image of you two together, it will feel impossibly recent and distant at the same time.
Your post will start to trend, outperforming most of the content in your friend’s feeds — it’s velocity aided by every like and comment from an estranged lover or high school cross country teammate. Technically, this will be one of your most successful posts of all time, it will do what you’d hoped that picture of you at Machu Picchu would do, it’s magnetism will attract attention from every corner of your network.
Unlike the act of talking to a person — which seems to make everything more real, putting it on social media actually makes it distant and impersonal, you become a spectator to the momentum of this weird event. You get mentioned in posts from strangers as they co-opt your tragedy for their own high-performing status updates. Alternately, your small cohort of hospital confidants will become absorbed by the digital buzz.
- You may just want to turn your notifications off for a few days.
Before I posted anything, there were a number of people I needed to call, this is tricky because there are inevitably people who will feel slighted by the fact that they found out on facebook — A quick note here, real talk, you are going to forget to call people, they might get offended, they might be hurt, but that’s not on you, this is an air mask on an airplane scenario, you have to take care of yourself first — call who you want to, post when you need to, be selfish for once in your life and don’t feel bad about it.
One of the people who got the call, was Mamie, Kirsten’s mom. To be honest, calling her was as much about wanting to connect with someone who I thought would understand loss as it was about preventing her from finding out about this the same way I had found out about Kirsten. She had no idea my mom was even sick (most people didn’t), but she wasn’t exactly shocked to hear from me, it turns out that after nearly 10 years of searching, someone had come forward and confessed to the murder of her daughter, she thought that perhaps I was calling because it had already leaked on Facebook somewhere.
This has been episode six of Good Grief, thank you so much for listening.
I just want to mention that while the strategies for coping with grief that I talk about in this podcast have worked for me, I am not a trained professional — just a guy with a liberal arts degree who watches a lot of youtube. If you or someone you know is going through a hard time, please do not hesitate to seek the help of a doctor or clinician.
If you like this podcast please rate, subscribe and share with your podcasty friends. If you have any questions, comments, feedback or you just want to talk, feel free to reach out on twitter or Instagram @blakeoftoday or just shoot me an email at blakeoftoday@gmail.com.
If you want to read a transcript of this or any other episode and see some rad pictures that inspired these shows, you can find them on my medium account/page…I’ll link to it in the show notes.
This week I want to leave you with this line from Aesop Rock’s — get out the car — an ode to his friend Camu Tao who passed away at 31 after a two year battle with lung cancer:
Been a bit since Mu died
Been a lot more loss in the wake
I recall thinking, “Someday
Someone’s gonna say it’s all from the same cause and effect”
And I just couldn’t fathom
Blaming a whole new page on a made-up chain reaction
