The loss of a person(ality)

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?

- Shephali Bhatt

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.”