A NOTE ON ORPHANAGE

on logging on to grieve. For most of the year, my social media presence is that of a ghost. The apps are buried in a folder on the last screen of my phone. Notifications silenced. The endless scroll a distant unappealing hum. It is a space I associate with the trivialities I wish to escape, gender reveals, political screeds from distant relatives, and the manicured gardens of other people’s accomplishments. I don’t need it. I don’t want it until I do. The need arrives with a brutal suddenness of a late night phone call. It comes with the words, “Are you sitting down?” It is the immediate gut- punching aftermath of loss. And in that disorienting fog of shock and sorrow, a strange primal instinct kicks in. I find myself reaching for my phone, my thumb navigating with a muscle memory I didn’t know I possessed. Tapping open that blue and white icon. Suddenly, I am not just a user. I am a digital mourner. And this platform I resent has become the only place I want to be. This is the great bizarre paradox of grieving in the 21st century. We turn to the most curated, artificial, and often isolating of spaces to process the most brutally real and connective of human experiences. The question is why and how does this flawed, imperfect vessel manage to provide such profound comfort. The psychology begins with the need for proof. In the immediate aftermath of a death, reality itself feels thin like a photograph that’s been overexposed. The world keeps moving. Cars are still driving. The grocery store is still open, but your personal world has stopped dead. The social media profile of the person you’ve lost becomes an anchor to reality. There they are, not were, but are in photos from a vacation last summer in a silly status update from 2014 in a shared article about a band they loved. The profile is a vibrant, chaotic, and irrefutable archive of a life- lived. Scrolling through it is not an act of morbid curiosity. It is an act of confirmation. They were here. This was real. Look at all this life. It is a shield against the abstract horror of absence. This digital space then transforms from an archive into a gathering place. Traditionally, when someone died, the community would physically gather. People would bring casserles, sit cha, hold awake. Neighbors would cluster on the front lawn, speaking in hush tones. Grief, while intensely personal, was a communal event. It was public. You were allowed to be seen in your sadness, and in being seen, you felt less alone. Social media has become the digital front lawn. The deceased’s profile wall becomes the destination for a modern pilgrimage. A post from the family announcing the death is followed by a cascade of comments, each one a virtual hand on the shoulder. I’m so sorry for your loss. I’ll never forget the time when they were such a wonderful person. Each comment from a college roommate, a former colleague, a childhood neighbor, is a small testament. Together, they form a collaborative eulogy, painting a picture of the person that is richer and more multifaceted than any single individual could have known. You learn small wonderful things. That your quiet uncle was a beloved mentor to a young coworker. That your high school friend secretly sent encouraging messages to people she barely knew. You are not just mourning the person you lost. You are meeting him again through the eyes of everyone they touched. The isolation of your pain is broken by the sheer volume of shared sorrow. This is where the comfort, so desperately needed, is found. Grief is not linear, and it does not respect business hours. It is a wave that crashes at 3:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. In those moments, you cannot call your friends or family, but you can open your phone. You can read the stories on their wall. You can look at their pictures and see them smiling. The profile is an asynchronous vigil, always lit, always waiting. It allows you to dip your toes into the waters of remembrance whenever you need to, without burdening anyone, without having to perform your grief for anyone else. It is a private conversation held in a public square. Of course, we must be antisocial media to be truly pro grief. This system is a crude, unintentional tool for mourning, and its flaws are often painfully apparent. The algorithm, blind and unfeilling, does not understand death. It will suggest you invite your deceased friend to an event. It will create a memory slideshow of your photos together, said to cheerful, upbeat music. It will surface their birthday with a prompted tell them you’re thinking of them. These moments are like digital landmines capable of detonating your composure with a single thoughtless notification. They are cruel glitches in the code of our remembrance, reminding us that we are grieving inside a machine built for engagement, not empathy. And yet, we persist. We persist because we are adaptable creatures who will use any tool at our disposal to navigate the wilderness of loss. We have taken a platform designed for self-promotion and repurposed it into a sanctuary for memory. The act of logging on when someone dies is not an obsession with the platform itself, but an obsession with connection, to the person who is gone, and to the community of people they left behind. It is a messy, imperfect, and deeply human thing to do. It is a testament to our stubborn need to gather in the dark, even if the only light we have is the cold blue glow of a screen. And when the initial terrible wave of grief begins to recede, we can log off again, leaving the digital ghost town behind, knowing the vigil will be kept until we need to return.