For the last 14-20 nights as I lay in bed I’ve been drafting the perfect Instagram caption about my dad’s recent passing. As a writer it feels impossible and frankly unreasonable to imagine writing such a thing on the fly, in the moment, on the seat of my non-existent pants (I sleep with a big shirt and underwear on) and then posting it into the digital word, the content cemented into my personal history like a tombstone.
I thought of going the traditional somber, realistic route – how I felt in the immediate days and weeks following the news and the funeral and the “being in Buffalo in 20 degree weather”.
I thought of going the succinct route – pictures of us as children in his lap, remarking on the attributes he’d given us and the things he never got to see.
I thought of going the poetic route – a life that ends is just that, a life.
I’ve written and rewritten through silent tears and full body heaves and pictured myself reading the comments below, full of red emoji hearts and kind words from people that would never be privy to this information at this time if it weren’t for the existence of Instagram. And I got nowhere. If you go on my IG right now, you won’t see any post about this life-changing event because I haven’t come up with anything that feels good, right, honest, special, important, and hopeful. Because nothing ever will feel that way to me.
It’s quite peculiar that one of the first things we think to do when we reach a major milestone in our lives is to post it on our personal bulletin boards, telling people we want to know and people we don’t particularly think about exactly what’s happening to us. It’s as if we marshal our tiny parades down Main Street, commandeering our float and commanding support from the little people below us who we feel lukewarm comradery with.
When my dad passed, after this reality was emotionally and spiritually processed, I realized that I had to post about it on Instagram. I had to. There was no question of “if” or “why”, it was immediately “when” and “how”. I have seen posts from friends and not-quite-friends and strangers about deaths in the family and I knew it was my turn to fall in line, a role I reluctantly accepted and was sure I would try my hardest to play.
But the more I thought about it, edited it, and imagined it in my digital life, the more wrong it felt to me. Besides paying taxes and working when I have my period and exercising when it's raining outside, I don’t tend to do things I don’t want to do. I’ve accepted that I will never parallel park (paying for parking is a welcomed charge), perform on a stage, write a memoir or do spoken word poetry because I don’t want to. Why was I forcing myself to do this?
Because this is what you’re supposed to do.
Now, I’ve done a lot of work in the last 5 or so years of unlearning societal norms that I always hated, and yes, unlearning is always a constant process. I certainly can’t say I’ve hit my last module yet but regardless of how far I’ve come, there are still cultural practices that seem objectively necessary. Until very recently, telling strangers on the internet that your parent suddenly passed away felt like one of those things. Which is so fucking strange. Most of the people who follow me on Instagram have never met my dad. A lot of the people who follow me on Instagram have never even met me. Why should they know? What gives them this privilege of being let into the tender, raw, and confused circle of my grief?
When I got ready to actually post something on Instagram I felt like I was lacing up my clown shoes and teasing my rainbow afro before the big performance. Even when I was preparing to write this Substack post, I had my moments of “getting ready”, wondering if I should even write this and how much I’m supposed to divulge in order to make it resonate without being a depressing diary entry that includes a minor plotline of social media criticism. But on here, unlike on Instagram, I’m not on stage squirting water out of fake flowers, I’m talking to people who’ve explicitly decided they care about what I have to say. If that’s not a friend to be vulnerable with, I’m hard pressed to find who is.
Vulnerability requires both strength and intentionality, and one of the best things about being a human is that you get to decide when you’re vulnerable, where you’re vulnerable, and who you’re vulnerable with. Writing this post heals the part of me that my imaginary Instagram post would have only made worse. The only thing harder than opening up to someone is accepting the reality that they didn’t deserve to hear it.