Life and Death on Social Media… WTF!

There’s been a death in a village near mine. I won’t tell you whose, and I won’t tell you the details, because that’s rather the point of what follows.

What I can tell you is that within days, someone who knew the family wrote what they called a “statement.” Several pages long. Chronological. Containing the kind of detail that should have stayed in a police file, a coroner’s report, or, frankly, nowhere at all outside the heads of the people who were actually there. It had a theory in it. A theory about what happened to someone’s mind in the days before they died. Posted to social media, for a village to read over their morning coffee.

The author’s defence, paraphrased, was: people were speculating, so I thought it best to put the facts out there.

I want to sit with that sentence for a moment, because it’s doing an enormous amount of work it hasn’t earned.

“Better that people know the facts” is the most dangerous lie in modern grief.

It sounds responsible. It sounds like the opposite of gossip, a corrective, a public service. But notice what it actually does: it takes something that was nobody’s business and makes it everybody’s business, on the grounds that everybody was already making it their business badly. That’s not solving the problem. That’s just appointing yourself the upgrade.

And here’s the bit that should make you uncomfortable rather than nod along: this isn’t really about one overstepping neighbour. It’s about what social media has quietly trained an entire generation to believe, that nothing is real, resolved, or finished, until it’s been narrated publicly, by someone, preferably with a bit of flair and a chronological structure.

We’ve done this with birth. We’ve done this with weddings, breakups, redundancies, diagnoses. And now we’re doing it with death, except death doesn’t get a redraft. You can delete an embarrassing relationship-status post. You cannot delete the version of events that’s now sitting in forty people’s heads about how someone’s last fortnight went.

The thing nobody wants to say out loud: broadcasting isn’t caring.

It feels like care. That’s the trap. The person writing that post almost certainly believed, sincerely, that they were doing right by their friend, stopping rumours, setting the record straight, being the one who steps up when nobody else will. I don’t doubt the sincerity. I doubt the logic.

Because care, real care, for the grieving and for the dead, tends to look quiet. It looks like a phone call instead of a post. It looks like sitting with someone’s confusion instead of resolving it for an audience. It looks like accepting that you don’t get to know how the story ends, because it isn’t your story, and some questions are still, genuinely, with a judge, not with you.

What that post actually offered wasn’t clarity. It was a finished narrative, complete with a tidy psychological theory wrapped around an open legal process, handed to a village that will now read every future development through the lens of one person’s account of what they think happened in someone else’s head. That’s not transparency. That’s narrative capture, and it happened to someone who isn’t around to object to how they’ve been written.

Due process exists for a reason most of us have forgotten.

There’s a Judge somewhere deciding whether more needs to be done. A toxicology result that hadn’t come back when this was posted. An autopsy. People whose job, unglamorous and slow, is to find out what actually happened before anyone writes the ending. That process is boring, by design. It doesn’t move at the speed of a Facebook post, and that’s a feature, not a flaw.

But boring doesn’t compete with a well-told story, and a well-told story is exactly what got published instead.

So here’s my actual point, the uncomfortable one.

This isn’t really a piece about one tone-deaf post in one village. It’s about the fact that we’ve built a culture where silence has come to look like negligence. Where saying nothing, while a family grieves and a legal process runs its course, has started to feel like the irresponsible option, and speaking, confidently, publicly, with a theory attached, has started to feel like the caring one.

It’s the other way round. It was always the other way round.

The dead don’t need us to explain them. The grieving don’t need us to resolve them. And the rest of us, frankly, don’t need to know.

Until Next Time