How grief can lead to terrible long-term performative connections
It’s 3pm CEST when my phone goes off with it’s regular bzzzzzzzt (phones should always be on silent, otherwise it’s an act of violent aggression). No need to check, I already know it’s my weekday bible verse/AI inspirational slop/clip art positivity mass forwarded text from my 9am EST step-maternal grandmother. I respond with the rote “Have a blessed/wonderful/joyous day” answer that has become automated and slip my phone back where it was. How did it come to this?
Prior to my mother passing in 2016, I had no relationship with this woman. Honestly could not have picked her out of a pair, with the other person being my neighbor. However, at the funeral, she took my hand and said that continuing to have a relationship with the daughter of such a wonderful woman was incredibly important to her. So I agreed and shared my number.
What came next has been a year’s long weekday train (she takes a break on Saturdays, Sundays, & occasional holidays) of repetitive and meaningless texts. In the early days, I tried to reach out weekly with phone calls, which then moved to monthly, quarterly, and now, never. She said she didn’t like talking on the phone, which surprised me given her generation, so I turned to more personalized text messages. When those remained unanswered, I gave up. The post-funereal drive for connection brought us to this.
Cut to my father passing in 2022. The frenzy was even more frenetic, most likely due to the covid impact on everyone, the sudden and unexpected grappling with mortality. We held a virtual memorial ceremony and, as the eldest daughter, I had taken over my father’s Facebook to share the news and coordinate things. As a result, I became the face of connection in a way I hadn’t quite been when my mother passed.
Mostly strangers to me, my father’s connections began reaching out, wanting to maintain whatever tenuous hold to his memory they were able, and I was the living embodiment of that. My younger brothers were much “better” at establishing the boundary with me that they didn’t want to speak with anyone that they hadn’t already known prior to losing our father. I, on the other hand, have a bleeding heart and can’t myself when I sense someone is hurting or longing.
What was wild to me was how my father’s family, as in his blood father and only surviving younger sister, did not do ANYTHING in the means of tangible support or care. His father sent a text, and his sister explosively declared on the virtual memorial that she would do all in her power to to there for her niece and nephews in the way she hadn’t been during his life, then to date, has never spoken to us again. My late mother’s family showed up more for us in the aftermath.
In the past few years, I have maintained occasional text relationships with many strangers from my parents lives. Mostly, this entails a text during the holidays and the random found photo of a photo of my parents being sent my way. I play PokemonGo now with my grandfather and father’s half-sister (different from the aunt that led the teary outburst during the memorial service. She’s still MIA). The new relationships feel so unnecessary, but I don’t have it in my heart to ignore them. Providing comfort in this way truly takes minimal effort and in a world so fragmented and isolated, why not contribute to a bit of net positivity?
Ultimately, I wish my family had talked about death more. Neither of my parents had wills or even life insurance, and picking up the pieces since losing them has gone on for years longer than I or siblings ever could have imagined. The psuedo-relationships I gained do not really add value to my life, so much as they placate the guilt that older adults feel about not having been better to the children turned younger adults in their lives. It’s a mess of feelings and a reminder of the ways we as humans fail one another in life and try to feebly make up for it following loss, without any true changes to habits or behaviors.
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