Does your Facebook timeline read like an obituary lately? With 33,000 dead from COVID-19 (and the government’s failed pandemic response), and as protocols on mass gatherings prevent families from mourning in person and together, Filipinos have taken to Facebook to mourn. Tagged as “digital mourning” by researchers, the act of using online platforms to mourn has become a pervasive practice among Filipinos amid the pandemic. How does this practice change the way – or more correctly, the ways – we mourn?

Traditional rituals related to death and mourning help us to confront death, and central to this confrontation is the body of the deceased. A repeated encounter with the dead’s body allows us to confirm personally, and therefore conclusively, that our loved one has indeed passed on. Without an encounter with the departed one’s body, which functions as the object of our grief, death seems to be denied. 

What happens then when pandemic protocols prevent us from getting together to view and mourn our dead?

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Digital mourning

Recent data show that 6 out of 10 people worldwide now use the internet, with 332 million people going online for the first time in 2020. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, Hootsuite and We Are Social found that the number of internet users increased by 4.2 million just between 2020 and 2021, bringing the total number of active social media users to 89 million. Major factors behind this spike are the pandemic lockdowns, stay-at-home policies, and other restrictions to mobility. In addition, the same report revealed that Filipinos spend an average of almost 11 hours per day on the internet, making the Philippines the “Social Media Capital of the World” for the sixth year in a row.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country, many bereaved Filipinos have taken to Facebook to post expressions of loss and mourning. Our emerging digital mourning practices seem to be modifications of pre-digital mourning practices. The announcement of the death of a loved one through a Facebook status, for example, becomes the new form of making phone calls to break the news of death to family members. Changing Facebook profile photos into a black square or an image of a candle now seems to be the digital equivalent of wearing black to signify one’s bereavement, and indicate that one wishes to be recognized as bereaved. Meanwhile, visiting the deceased’s profile on Facebook appears to be the pandemic version of visiting the dead’s grave. 

Prior to the pandemic, death has always been a family and community affair in the country – from the time of death to the funeral procession, and even up to the first anniversary of someone’s passing, the entire extended family is mobilized in various ways. Relatives living and working abroad almost always fly home when there is news of death. Family members partake in minute tasks for the wake, serving snacks and refreshments to guests, entertaining pockets of people, receiving abuloy from time to time, organizing the pamisa, and coordinating the logistics of every tribute activity. Grief is shared primarily with family, but also with friends. Death, then, enlivens and creates community. This sense of community is also fostered online, but in a rather different manner and intensity.

At the same time, newer mourning practices are also emerging in the digital sphere. Whereas pre-pandemic and in-person eulogies tend to be formal and usually address an audience of mourners, Filipino Facebook users can be observed to often speak publicly, and informally and directly to the dead, as if the latter were still alive. Some even use “textspeak” or a series of emojis to convey what they feel. This suggests that Filipino Facebook users have developed unique ways of posting about death on the platform, changing our mourning “vernacular” in the process. 

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Some users have also deliberately appropriated some of Facebook’s features to mourn. One example is Facebook Memories, a feature that was originally intended to let platform users reflect on moments – as captured in posts, photos, or videos – that they have shared or figured in with their Facebook friends. During the pandemic, Facebook users have utilized this feature as a prompt to remember the deceased and post about them, or as a time capsule and journaling device to document one’s emotional state, allowing a user to recall her journey of grieving in the future.

These modified and new digital mourning rituals on Facebook indicate that Filipinos are forced to creatively seek ways to “enfranchise” their grief amid a highly constricting climate of death and loss. Facebook is becoming an alternative site for mourning, commemoration, and remembrance. As a social platform built to encourage interaction, Facebook allows the bereaved to receive support from friends amidst physical distancing and other health protocols. It also bridges the distance between family members living in different areas of the globe.

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The future of digital mourning

Since digital mourning is a relatively new phenomenon in the Philippines, we must pay keen attention to how it develops over the next months and even years, even as we dislike the prospect of the pandemic continuing. In particular, we need to understand its social and cultural effects. One instructive case here is about the so-called “hierarchies of grief.”

Since anyone on Facebook can post about and mourn a death, digital mourning allows organic, uncensored, and marginal accounts of remembrance and memorialization to surface. It gives even the most distant friend or acquaintance opportunities to offer their own biographical account or narrative about the deceased. They can announce the news of death independently from the deceased’s family, they can post photos of the deceased or tag them in their Facebook status and updates, and they can share their own memories with the deceased. Hence, it democratizes the creation and sharing of eulogies. This contrasts with traditional forms of in-person mourning, which tend to reflect normative family structures, and where families tend to become the “primary mourners.”

This leveling out, however, may not always be welcome and may even create tension. Digital mourning may also disrupt certain mourning hierarchies. It may cause loved ones, or those closest to the deceased, for example, to feel that their grief has been disregarded or overlooked. Or worse, they may sense that their narratives of remembrance have been hijacked or seized by others, since everyone might feel the need to share their own grief about the passing of the deceased. It then poses several predicaments regarding the traditional means of interacting with mourners and with the memory of the deceased. 

As technology develops and the COVID-19 situation unfolds, we can expect digital mourning to be a permanent fixture in the expanding set of Filipino mourning rituals and practices in the coming months. However that may play out, one thing is for sure: our dead live on, on Facebook. – Rappler.com

Noreen H. Sapalo is an anthropologist interested in digital affect cultures. This piece is based on her Masters’ thesis, a digital ethnography of death, grief, and mourning amid the COVID-19 pandemic. She is currently an instructor at the Department of Anthropology at the University of the Philippines Diliman. 

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