Be right back

What does it mean to live, love and lose on the internet? In a culture that urges us to mourn in private and piece ourselves back together in silence, a few outliers are carving out spaces for grief to bloom.

- By SAACHI GUPTA. Illustrated by TANVI DESAI THAKKAR.

“I REMEMBER THINKING that I needed to discuss this with John,” Joan Didion writes in her 2005 memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking, published after the death of her husband of nearly 40 years, John Gregory Dunne. “I could not count the times during the average day when something would come up that I needed to tell him,” she continues. “This impulse did not end with his death. What ended was the possibility of response.” This excerpt routinely makes the rounds on Instagram along with another popular quote attributed to writer Jamie Anderson: “Grief is just love with no place to go.”

What neither Didion nor Anderson could have predicted was that, in the years to come, this unexpressed love would, in fact, find release. On the same internet where we now permanently live, we also fervently hold onto the dead. Until a few months ago, Reena Arora frequently appeared on her singer-songwriter daughter Raveena Aurora’s Instagram feed, celebrating in front of a hoarding featuring her new single, sewing outfits for her to wear on stage or lying in a hospital bed, holding her child’s hand. Now, without her mother’s grounding presence, Raveena moves nervously at an online grief retreat she has organised. While most people have been kind, she writes to me later, it is still hard to have every facial expression and micro-movement scrutinised as she tries to recover from a life-altering loss.