Thanks to ozy.com:

MEMORIALIZING

SOURCE: GETTY

Taking the Face of Grief Online

Funeral Selfies, a 21st-Century Way to Grieve

December 07, 2013By Barbara Fletcher

SHARE ON FACEBOOKSHARE ON FACEBOOK SHARE ON TWITTERSHARE ON TWITTERSHARE ON EMAILEMAIL

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Because taking self-portraits at funerals isn’t about narcissism. It’s about coping.

What’s the worst thing you can do at a funeral? Dress inappropriately? Bring a snack or a date? Forget to silence your phone? OK, how about snapping a photo of yourself — a selfie — and posting it online?

Cue audible gasp. If you are unfamiliar with the concept of the #funeralselfie, this may come as a shock. But it’s becoming a common practice among the younger generation, and some professionals think it’s OK. Even a good thing.

Is tweeting a self-portrait from a funeral simply the online evolution of bereavement? 

The selfie is a way of saying, “I was there” — whether that’s in front of a bedroom mirror, at a concert or, more recently, at a funeral. Fast Company senior editor Jason Feifer knows a lot about funeral selfies; in late October he created a Tumblr dedicated to them. Selfies at Funerals is an online exhibit dedicated to self-portraits that have been taken at funerals and posted to Twitter. The idea originated while Feifer was on vacation in Europe and saw people snapping themselves at solemn locations like the Berlin Wall and the Anne Frank House. 

SOURCE: GETTY

Most of the Tumblr posts show young adults smiling, making faces or modeling their funeral attire with a short description of the event, such as, ”Love my hair today. Hate why I’m dressed up,” and hashtags like #rip, #iloveyou, #longday, #mom. The site saw immediate popularity — and although there were only two days of posts, Selfies at Funerals made both Tumblr’s and Buzzfeed’s Best of 2013 lists. 

Pictures should be taken if it helps in your grieving process and if it feels like the right thing to do.

 —  JAMIE REED, FUNERAL DIRECTOR

But Feifer didn’t create the site to make a comment. He approached it like an article he would write as a journalist. ”It’s more of a statement,” he says. “Hey, look what’s become commonplace!”

Not surprisingly, many see the funeral selfie as disrespectful and self-absorbed. Feifer received one menacing video of a man’s disapproval, which he posted to Tumblr. There are nay-sayers on Twitter too, with reactions like, “I have lost my hope in humanity.” Some think the practice trivializes such a somber event. A recent CNBC story takes aim at the funeral selife: ”We don’t even know how to be depressed anymore. There is tedium in every social medium to the point where even death becomes boring.” 

But perhaps they’re missing the point. Sharing online what may seem to be frivolous details about day-to-day life goes deeper than it looks. For a generation that lives in the digital realm, tweeting and Instagramming is a vital form of communication and connection. And in this community of documentation and sharing, people also find support. Funeral selfies have become a form of grieving.

Just ask the new generation of funeral professionals. 

’Taking selfies is a ritual action, just as valid as any other ritual action performed at the time of death.’

Caitlin Doughty, a Los Angeles mortician and founder of the website Order of the Good Death, a collective dedicated to helping people accept death, cautions against judging people for how they grieve. ”There are many different ways that cultures deal with death, many different ways they express themselves through ritual actions. Teenagers taking selfies is a ritual action, just as valid as any other ritual action performed at the time of death.”

TAKING A FUNERAL SELFIE

SOURCE: JAMIE REED

Jamie Reed, now a funeral director and embalmer, takes a self-portrait prior to a funeral service

Jamie Reed, a 27-year-old funeral director and embalmer in Kansas, once disapproved of funeral selfies. But that opinion changed when she realized that she took her own funeral selfie a few years ago at a service for her grandmother. Feeling awkward before the funeral, she spent some time in the bathroom touching up her look — which included her grandmother’s lipstick. She photographed herself in the mirror and then took a few shots of the room where her grandmother’s body rested. She shared the selfie on her blog; the other photos she kept to herself because ”not everything needs to be shared with the world.” There are limits to respect.

There are other ground rules when it comes to public mourning on the Web. Photos should not infringe on people’s privacy (like capturing another griever or a dead body), nor should they serve as a grief avoidance tactic. If selfies ”are being used to distract [someone] from the actual interaction with death and real emotion, it may be a problem,” Doughty cautions.

Reed thinks families and friends of the deceased should feel comfortable documenting their experience, whatever form that takes. ”Pictures should be taken if it helps in your grieving process and if it feels like the right thing to do,” she says.

So before we write off the funeral selfie as a narcissistic, boundary-busting move of the millennial crowd, maybe we should ask ourselves what’s really going on. Is tweeting a self-portrait from a funeral simply the online evolution of bereavement? The 21st-century version of the grief support group?

Read more: Funeral Selfies | Resolved | OZY 

Widowed: No Husband=No Friends, Family !!

New York Times, Sunday, October 27, 2013, Sunday Review section, Page SR 8:

PRIVATE LIVES October 23, 2013, 9:30 pm 871 Comments

No Husband, No Friends

By CHARLOTTE BROZEK

Private Lives:Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

TAGS:

GRIEF (EMOTION), WIDOWS AND WIDOWERS

Thanks to Noah, the world is made up of people in twosomes. I never thought much about the ark until my husband died one bright, sunny November morning almost one year ago.

My friends headed for the hills. In the last years of my husband’s life, we had come to rely on two or three couples for entertainment, but they disappeared after he died. Were they afraid to face their own mortality, or was it that the dynamics we presented as a duo were lost with me as a widow? Widow. The word means empty. Another charming word I have come to embrace: bereave — to deprive or rob. Here I find myself a bereaved widow, relegated by my erstwhile friends to the occasional lunch or shopping spree. I didn’t have any single friends. (And if I had, I probably would have treated them the same.) I was struggling with the No.1 stressor on the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory — death of a spouse — sans friends.

Everywhere I go, everywhere I look, couples surround me in the supermarket, at the mall and in their S.U.V.’s awaiting a green light. I never noticed the twosomes before. Now they make me feel obsolete. Whether he knew it or not, Noah set the course for bias against singles. Singles can’t dine in the finest restaurants. Singles disrupt the seating in theater rows. And singles can’t be seen cavorting with couples. I understand Noah’s plan — the world needed two to tango in the face of an annihilating flood. But he should have designated a section on the ark for us.

Jillian Tamaki

I spend most of my days alone in the bereavement bunker. That’s what I call the place I rented. After my husband died, I navigated through the many stages of grief. The first one is the merciful one — numbness — the stage at which one makes idiotic decisions, like selling the place you live in without a well-thought-out plan of where you might go. I did a lot of wacky things during that stage, but moving eight months after my husband died to take up residence in a tiny rental a few miles away tops the list. I sent most of my furnishings to auction and discarded the majority of the rest. Two days after moving into the bunker, I was reading with a borrowed flashlight because I couldn’t count a lamp among my possessions. Everything I saved I didn’t need, and everything I threw away, I had to replace.

Some time later I briefly touched on the anger stage of grief. I held the doctors, the nurses, the drug companies and the old slash, burn and poison protocol of cancer treatment in this country responsible for my husband’s death. Now I just blame Noah.

Frankly, I’m sick and tired of the stages. I went from depression to panic attacks back to depression to migraines, to abdominal migraines, to not sleeping, to sleeping too much, to never leaving the bunker, to not wanting to go back to the bunker. To deal with my mood swings, I have seen a grief counselor and a psychiatrist and attend a support group. My counselor advised me I wasn’t acting irrationally — it was all just coping mechanisms. She suggested I make friends. My psychiatrist prescribed anti-depressants so I would stop acting irrationally. How can I go wrong?

Someone once said that being a widow is like living in a country where nobody speaks your language. In my case, it’s only my friends, family and acquaintances who all now speak Urdu — it’s not the whole country. I discovered strangers possess more compassion than my own friends and family. My kids make me feel like I lost my mind, and not their dad. Bereavement isn’t a lobotomy, children. It’s a loss.

Speaking of loss, I not only lost my husband and my life, I also lost my hair. My crowning glory plus my eyebrows — would you believe it — fell out in clumps a few months after my husband’s death. My doctor assured me that the hair loss was because of shock and that it would grow back in a couple of years. And I thought the universe was through with me.

Recently, a policeman pulled me over for failure to move. The traffic was being redirected, but I had frozen and held up a long line. I put out my hands, waiting to be cuffed, saying there’s nothing more you can do to me that’s worse than what’s already been done.

He said, “What’s that, ma’am?”

I said, “I have no husband, no friends and no hair.”

He let me go with a warning.

---

Charlotte Brozek lives in New Jersey and is working on a series of essays about the grieving process.