Dealing with grief

My former girlfriend passed away about two weeks ago while I was in Pittsburgh. I loved her dearly and she showed me what it was like to have someone love me. She was one of my best friends. I will definitely look back at our good times together very fondly.

But this post is not meant to act as a eulogy, but be about some observations I made while grieving about how today's interconnected world has changed how we deal with grief. For instance, I got an email from Meesh's mother to call her as soon as I could while in the conference in Pittsburgh. I then went outside and phoned her on my cell and she told me what happened. Before the days of cell phones it would have required Meesh's mom to know that I was out of town, in Pittsburgh, and what hotel I was at or what conference to get a hold of me. Without email and easily available Internet thanks to WiFi, I would not have found out what happened until I turned my cell back on. In today's world even bad news reaches us faster than it used to.

After finding out, I was tasked with notifying friends in Vancouver. But with email I was able to take an email Meesh had sent to her local friends and just send an email to all of them about what had happened. I didn't need to track down phone numbers or worry about how to reach people I didn't know; a single email took care of it. It also meant I had to deal with what happened, so my denial phase was rather short lived.

And having to only send a single email was a relief. When I sent it out I was not exactly emotionally put together. It took about a week before I could really talk about it without breaking down. Being able to write an email meant someone didn't have to get a sobbing phone call from me, nor did I have to endure the pain of constantly talking about what happened with people. Plus people were able to email me their condolences; hearing from so many people meant a lot ot me.

I still remember when my dad had to call people and arrange things for my grandmother when she passed away while we were visiting NYC. It took him days in the hotel room, making phone calls, etc. It was not a pleasant experience for him and I am glad I didn't have to go through everything he did to contact people and pass along information.

And Meesh's Facebook page quickly turned into a memorial to her. There was a Wired article a while back about some murder in Oregon and it mentioned how the deceased had a MySpace page that people posted to. Now I understand why people used it like they did. When I posted to Meesh's wall it released a ton of emotions about what I had lost and it let other people share in my grief. Without Facebook everyone would have not been able to share until the funeral which obviously not everyone could make considering Meesh had friends in both Vancouver and the Bay Area. It also spread the news that much faster to even more people than I could reach by email.

Whether we like it or not, how we grieve in this world has changed. From my perspective, it is for the better as it helped me deal with my grief.