The Power of Parasocial Grief
The grief you feel is real, and it's here for a reason
“I learned that just beneath the surface there's another world, and still different worlds as you dig deeper. I knew it as a kid, but I couldn't find the proof. It was just a kind of feeling. There is goodness in blue skies and flowers, but another force--a wild pain and decay--also accompanies everything.” - David Lynch
When was the last time a celebrity or fictional character died, and you felt a deep and true grief – one that maybe knocked the wind out of you a bit because you didn’t expect it to hit you so hard? I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it wasn’t very long ago. Maybe a day, maybe a week, month, a year, maybe more. But I’ll guess there’s someone. Mister Rogers or Princess Diana or Michael Jackson or David Lynch – I remember watching that movie with Robert Pattinson, Remember Me, without knowing that that was the ending, and when that last scene played I felt genuine and true and potent grief, silly as that may sound. I would randomly burst into tears for the next day or two, I don’t remember how long. Sure it’s just a character in a movie, but physically and emotionally I did experience a bout of mourning. When Robin Williams died, I felt another more prolonged period of grief. When you think of a media figure who you grieved, you might also have memories of people around you telling you to get over it, to stop pretending to be so upset or to stop talking about it, that it’s not that big of a deal.
And sure, in this great big wide world, maybe there are “more important things”, but life isn’t just the big important things, is it? Life is the crunching of snow under your feet and it’s smiling at a stranger and it’s watching a good movie that makes you feel like you’re soaring for days after. Life is actually a great deal more of small “unimportant” moments than big important ones, isn’t it? But you’re not not living in those moments. The grief you felt - or feel - about the loss of someone you’ve never met feels real because it is.
A parasocial relationship (PSR) is one in which someone develops what they feel is a real and close bond with someone that they do not know in real life. This applies to celebrities, social media creators, fictional characters, writers, politicians and so on. “Unlike traditional relationships (e.g., with friends or colleagues), a PSR occurs between a media user (e.g., television viewer) and a media figure (e.g., television character or celebrity). Specifically, a PSR is a relationship that mimics the intimacy of a face-to-face relationship but without the two parties knowing each other on a personal level. Through continued exposure, such as watching television and reading magazines, media users become intimately acquainted with the media figure.” [1] And grief researchers have studied parasocial grief and have found that, actually, yes all those times where you feel like you’re in mourning for a media figure, you are grieving. “[Analysis of fan forum posts after celebrity deaths] revealed that people expressed grief-related emotions … [One researcher’s] findings indicate that the coping mechanisms people used for managing their grief after the death of a celebrity are similar to how people cope with the death of a loved one. That is, after the loss of a loved one, people utilized emotional expressions, reminisced, mentioned heaven or the afterlife, and discussed the deceased’s positive characteristics.”
When we look at the tributes to David Lynch in the last couple days, what we see over and over again are people who say that Lynch showed them how to look at the world in a new way, to embrace surrealism and the beauty in the mundane; to see that the “universe is in your basement” [2], to feel fortified in their earnestness. And these are qualities not to be taken lightly, especially in a world where everything truly feels so terrible and so fraught and so hard so much of the time. You grieve because you were changed, why deny yourself the alchemy of that grief? The person that shows you that the world is contained inside of yourself is significant.
People like Lynch, who are artists and creators, who bring into this world something profound and beautiful and utterly unique, who shape how we see the world, will of course be missed, will of course impact us and of course be mourned. There is nothing shameful in that, and it is not indicative of an unhealthy attachment. Researchers “argued that people would grieve the loss of someone with whom they have identified, even though [they] might not necessarily know the deceased on a personal level.”
But there are a few aspects which may make grieving these deaths difficult. One is that the average person cannot participate in traditional mourning rituals like a funeral, wake and so on with media figures. Another is that, as touched upon before, these losses are often written off as unimportant or inconsequential to those in our lives, meaning they are disenfranchised. Disenfranchised grief is grief that one feels, either because of internal or external messaging, that they cannot or should not grieve. I have written more about disenfranchised grief here [“Am I Grieving Right?”]. So too may you find yourself struggling with your grief if the person who died was also someone who caused harm. You may find yourself grieving the artist, or grieving a living person whose work you no longer find yourself comfortable engaging with. These griefs, too, should be honored and nurtured. You can still grieve imperfect people as long as you let yourself acknowledge the breadth of your feelings - your disappointment, your hurt, your sadness, and your grief can all coexist if you let them. Unacknowledged they’re liable to become necrotic.
Ways to cope with grief around these hurdles are:
to talk to like-minded people online or in person, by nurturing continuing bonds (watching their movies, listening to their music, implementing their wisdom into your everyday life, like honoring Anthony Bourdain by eating with joyful unselfconscious vigor [3], honoring David Lynch by failling, following your curiosity, or relishing in the “cuts and bruises” of things [4]).
Make some art about them. Or if you don’t make art, find the thing in the world that makes you feel the way they made you feel, even for a moment. It might be in a blazer you put on to feel more confident, or a freedom you give yourself for 5 minutes to ‘let the soft animal of your body love what it loves’ [5]. Get off your phone and watch a movie that makes you leave the theater trembling to do something profound brave, take a walk and talk to a stranger.
Kurt Vonnegut once said “ [I] go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And I don't know… of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.” [6]
Dance around. Buy one envelope at a time. Cry when someone you admired died, even if there’s not a chance in hell they ever even knew you existed, because that doesn’t matter here. It doesn’t. Your grief doesn’t need an intimacy metric. It isn’t more real because you met someone a million times or lived with them. And this doesn’t just apply to parasocial grief - if an internet friend or acquaintance or your coworker dies and you suddenly find yourself utterly bereft, give yourself the space to feel that and to sit with it and nourish it. That grief is there for a reason, don’t snuff it out.
That’s really the crux of all of my grief work – the grief you feel is here for a reason. If you think you are feeling grief then you are, so let yourself. It doesn’t need to mean you’re weeping and gnashing your teeth in public, or even calling out of work or telling anyone about it. It can happen between you and a cup of black coffee, or between you and your journal, or between you and your blog. But let it happen. Because when we pretend the grief we feel isn’t a grief we feel, then it doesn’t have a chance to wax and then wane.
It’s like this: have you ever noticed your cat really getting in your business when you’re cooking, and they keep getting way too close to you and that little brat is about to jump on the counters for God’s sake. But all it really is is that they’re curious, and all you have to do is hold out what you’re chopping, and let them sniff it. They’ll give a good whiff, maybe two, then they’ll sit back, satisfied and out of your way. That curious cat is your grief. If you keep trying to kick the cat out of the kitchen instead of just letting it sniff your parsley or that paper bag, it’s just gonna keep getting in your way. Just take a second to pause and acknowledge it, because that might be all it needs to stop clawing at your ankles.
Some questions to help you start to nurture your grief:
Who is a media figure that had a profound impact on you?
What quality is it they had that you valued so much?
Can you bring that quality into your life?
Which instances or works endeared you to them first?
What is one thing you can do today to honor them and nurture your grief?
Does it matter to you to validate your grief in this way?
Also I would be remiss not to add that in 2024 David Lynch mentioned that he could no longer leave his house because people by and large are no longer taking COVID precautions and his emphysema meant he was conscious about not getting infected. Evidence seems to indicate that the wildfires in LA directly contributed to his death. These wildfires lately have been caused by climate change which has been catapulted forward by AI water use and Israel bombing Palestine and surrounding countries. To honor him and protect people like him, wear a well fitting respirator in public, find alternatives to AI, and stand with Palestine. Type “-ai” after a search on Google or use a browser like Yahoo. It is not a reach to connect these dots. As Jenny Holzer says, “all things are delicately interconnected”.