We Need Each Other - on digital Grief Gatherings
This Grief Thing by Fevered Sleep
It’s 6:15pm in the UK, we, the hosts of this online Grief Gathering, arrive early to prepare the digital space: set the music volume, adjust lighting levels, type out our names, rearrange our environments.
I’m sat on cushions on the floor of my daughter’s bedroom in my home in Reading, the only place I can be certain of not being disturbed for the next 90 minutes; when everyone is at home all of the time, there already exists a sketchy line between the you of working and the you of everything else in your life, and this restless tea time slot is an even harder one to close the door on. But it’s now 6:25pm and people have started to arrive in the digital ‘waiting room’, so one by one, we let them in. As 7 new faces blink into being, a gathering of strangers begins.
The new familiarity with digital spaces which have allowed many of us to stay connected during lockdown brings a new sort of kindness of being with other people.
The technical issues, the halting interruptions of unstable connections, the unnatural pauses and uninvited ambient noise, the distracting reflection of ourselves as others are seeing us; we’re somehow more tolerant, more able to filter out the irrelevant.
You’d think that grief would be an impossible thing to honour and hold on or through a screen, but in fact grief here is soft, it is yielding, despite the fact we are not close to each other and the flatness of the pixelated screen robs us of the ability to decipher the million micro signals tripping over our faces and running across our bodies.
Grief here meanders and seeps, slipping into the gaps between our thoughts and words and the shifting of bodies as we work out how to communicate heavy and often previously untold feelings across space.
There is rawness meeting tenderness, there is wisdom meeting unknowing, there is rage meeting despair, meeting compassion, meeting affirmation.
Do I dare to speak? Will I crumble? Will my anger be met with understanding? Can I find the words to describe these things I am feeling which I never knew I could feel? Are my feelings too much for this place that I’ll be met with a jolting silence?
I am aware of emphatic nodding; of chuckling recognitions; of gentle “uh-huhs” and encouraging “mhms-hhms”. I can hear the digital silence punctuated by the melody of attentive humans.
We need each other. And for now at least, we can continue to connect with strangers, to talk and reflect and listen and give voice to our thoughts and feelings on grief. When the world has changed so drastically that the sharing of a physical space just for friendship, or for celebrations, or for wakes or funerals, is strictly regulated, we can still meet here.
A 90 minute early evening Grief Gathering has a touch of the theatrical about it. The refocusing of a lamp, the drawing closer of a chair. The fleeting appearances of dogs or cats sweeping across screens. The bowed head or the closed eyes of someone listening more intently.
At 7:55pm, as we near the end of the session, the daylight has slowly faded to darkness in some people’s digital windows, rendering them as shadows or soft silhouettes before they finally disappear from our screens. No longer strangers.
Hushed goodbyes,
Heartfelt thankyous,
Brief lingerings,
Words of encouragement and love.
In this unnatural digital space, these are resolutely human encounters.