Alison Garwood Jones

Social media is mostly broken.

But there are sporadic green shoots pushing through the muck that show human progress is possible and necessary.

One of those shoots is our return to acknowledging grief in public.

I’m talking about the hand-in-hand social media meme that announces the passing of a parent, spouse, friend or pet. (I’ve never seen a parent-child hand-holding moment on social; that would just be too painful to share).

For the deaths that feel more in line with the natural cycle of life, we’re letting the world know about our losses.

To me the hand-holding meme is the modern-day equivalent of wearing black in public.

It’s hard to believe, but even the emotionally-repressed Victorians did grief better than we’ve been doing it these last 75 years.

They wore black for a year to let the wider world know, “I just lost someone I love, so be gentle and pray for me.”

They also held open-casket visitations in their front parlours so friends, neighbours and rambunctious kids could come around and show their support. The dead person downstairs was “in your face” by today’s standards, but cathartic.

Sometime after WWII, we started to offload death and dying to hospitals and the funeral industry, and paved over our ritual of grieving as a community. Grief went underground, with nowhere to go.

Social media, as brutal as it has become, is our chance to publicly ask our colleagues, our boss, and even our enemies for some grace while we figure out how to live with loss.

That’s why I don’t see this meme as performative or TMI, although it is a wakeup call in between all the posts on AI, the latest surefire content marketing tips, and the surplus of politically-motivated cruelty.

I think this is why Kirkus Reviews wrote about my book this week in a roundup of standout indie books that ground universal themes in everyday details. I MISS MY MOMMY shows our myriad responses to grief and commits to telling the truth about life through a series of illustrated portraits.

My thanks to Chaya Schechner, President of Kirkus Indie, for understanding what I was trying to do.

Make I MISS MY MOMMY your source of comfort this Mother’s Day.

Shop: PenJarProductions.com

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