_{*Quick Summary: The author has a habit of unfollowing people on social media and deleting their contact info from his phone immediately upon their death.*}

While it might sound a little humorous, the sentiment is real – I unfollow people on social media when they die. I also remove their contact info from my phone almost immediately. What may seem cold is actually a coping mechanism for me. In no way does it represent my love or appreciation for that person. It isn’t about the deceased person at all. It’s totally about me.

That last sentence sounded a bit selfish, but it isn’t meant to be. I have dealt with a lot of loss in my life. Much of it prior to the cell phone/social media era. I’m a very sentimental person. Experience has taught me in order to cope with most big losses, I have to control my intake of it as best I can. I work to take in just enough to feel the loss and remember, but not so much that I’m bombarded with other people’s grief too. During the loss of family or a close friend, my grief is plenty for me to process, and unless it’s necessary for me to do so, I try not to take on anyone else’s like we do when viewing mutual friend’s posts on social media. I’ve learned that each person has to process their own grief in their own way. It isn’t possible to process grief for someone else. You can listen, comfort, pray, and just be there to help lighten the burden a bit, but they own their grief.

Those realizations came from many episodes of loss and a lot of self-introspection. Knowing what my own boundaries are has been difficult to learn, but absolutely crucial. When confronted with loss, it is better for me to delete/unfollow immediately, while I’m still in the unbelief stage. The things that happen in that stage immediately after you hear the news, tend to produce patchy memories. You’ll remember the important things, but details can slip through the cracks as your mind works to process the news. In those first moments, if I handle the delete/unfollow task, it is one less thing I will have to do later when it would absolutely cause me more pain as I’m more aware.

Why am I telling you this? Mostly because if you know me, we likely share some mutual friends. Some may even be your family. I don’t want anyone to have hard feelings with me if they notice I’ve unfollowed their loved one. Eventually, social media will fade, or disappear altogether, so who we follow, or who follows us has no impact on real life other than what we each assign to it. It doesn’t affect my memories of the time we spent together one bit. I’ve stated in the past, social media means very little to me. It’s not real life to me. If deleting/unfollowing allows me to process a death better, then I hope you’ll forgive me now that you know why I do it.

For what it’s worth, I have requested all my social media be deleted upon my death, so you’re unfollowing me too, you just don’t know it yet!