Grieving in the age of Twitter

How do you deal with death? Do you go into a shell, refusing to talk about your loss with anyone, choosing to wallow on your own? Or do you want to be surrounded by friends and loved ones, who you can share your sorrow with, or simply be comforted by? Or would you rather go about doing what you do every day, letting daily routine make the loss ebb away?

If you are on Twitter, all three choices are ruled out. Privacy isn’t an option; there’ll be more than just close friends — and many strangers — wanting to share your grief; and Twitter sure as hell won’t let you forget. Instead, your timeline will react in myriad ways, a flurry of RIPs and hash-tags accompanied. Many will tag the dead person. Tagging someone on Twitter ensures the person being tagged is made aware of the fact that s/he’s been talked about/to. Tagging a dead person, then, makes things a wee bit more morbid than they already are.

Last week, Mona Kapoor, the owner of Future Studio (where a number of television shows are shot) and the ex-wife of film producer Boney Kapoor, passed away after a prolonged battle with cancer. I had never met or spoken to Kapoor, but we interacted on Twitter, where she was very active, with close to 40,000 tweets and more than 20,000 people following her on the social networking site. She would often tweet to me with feedback or a kind word to a film review or article I had written, or to share conversations pertaining to movies, both old and new. Like a number of film directors, writers and journalists who followed her, but didn’t know her personally, I had come to learn one thing about Mona — she wanted every new film, irrespective of whether she herself liked it or not, to do well. That positivity in someone from the film industry was hard to find.

Her death, then, came as much as a shock to the community of Twitter users who followed Mona, as it did for many people in the film industry. On Sunday morning, tweets about Mona needing urgent blood led to a number of donors calling up the hospital she was put up at. One film journalist who called to inquire how she could donate, was told by hospital authorities that they had more than an overwhelming number of donors volunteering, and hence had over the required quota. An hour later, the news of Mona’s death hit Twitter. Then began a slew of ‘RIP’ tweets; people across the board offering condolences and expressing shock and grief. Many who knew her personally — or had gotten to know her through Twitter — shared anecdotes and memories.

What was unsettling, among all the tweets, were the ones that tagged Mona (@monakapoor3), as if she would reply to each one at a better time later. Among them were “@monakapoor3 miss you”, “@monakpoor3 may your soul rest in peace, ma’am”, and even “@monakapoor3 heartfelt condolences.”  One tweet to her read “Is it true, you are dead?”

Twitter can be a reminder of how fickle life, and death, is in more ways than one. An “RIP xxx” tweet is often followed by an “I just bought an iPad2. Yippee!” or an “OMG! Sachin’s got a hair-transplant. Kewl.” tweet by the same person, the grief all too transient. Someone truly affected by a person’s death might tweet about the departed more than once, may be for two to three days, or stay away from Twitter altogether.

They will eventually get back to being their random judgement-making, joke-cracking, opinion-forming self, all of which seem to be must-haves for anyone with a Twitter account. Life on Twitter will go on.

Twitter itself doesn’t make things any easier. More than a year after the death of filmmaker Manish Acharya, the site often lists him under “Who to follow” recommendations that pop up on screen every now and then. The dead person’s Twitter profile, meanwhile, will continue to act as a reality check.

Mona’s last tweet before her death reads, “once more any1 asks hw I am I wl block them. U all knw I am in hosp n battlng stagr 3 multiple organs cancer. Kindly pray fr me. Thts all.” The tweet will always remain, floating around in Twitterverse forever.