The Month of Blissful Ignorance: Day Four

It seems stupid to talk about something as frivolous as my social media challenge in light of my grandmother’s recent death, but it raises some interesting questions for me.

By deliberately not telling my social network about her passing, are there people who would genuinely like to know who will not find out at all, or not for a while? Would I get some comfort from posting about it on Facebook and receiving a flood of sympathetic comments? Is this an occasion where it makes more sense to break my resolution long enough to let my friends know? The answers are I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know.

I seem to remember that when my grandfather died in 2009, I didn’t do anything more than post the obituary I had written as a note on my Facebook page. (Oh, and since he was also my Scrabble buddy, I challenged all my friends to tribute games of Facebook Scrabble.) I can’t remember whether either of those things helped.

A final thought: I’ve noticed before that I automatically twitch to Facebook or Twitter whenever I encounter something hard, something boring, something frustrating, something annoying. I can now add “something sad” to that list—there are other (healthy and unhealthy) ways to numb pain, of course, but it’s shocking to think how much I would be using social media for that if it were an option.