The Healing Power of Online Communities (Yes, Even Reddit)
Thank you to Connecting Directors contributing writer Emily Gehman for this story!
Dylan Haas came home from a shift as an NYC maître d’hôtel expecting to enjoy a nice evening with his girlfriend. But a surprise visit from his mom and sister was anything but pleasant.
They were there to deliver the news that Dylan’s dad had died. Earlier that day, he had been driving when he had a heart attack. He didn’t survive the ensuing crash.
“No warning, no slow burn — he was gone, just like that,” Dylan wrote in a mashable.com post.
The Tragedy Tailspin
Dylan was only 22, and he had never considered what would need to happen after such a tragedy. He was only just beginning his adult life, and he’d had no time to prepare for the death of a loved one. Not that preparing makes loss any easier. But no goodbyes, no answers to any life questions, just a hole in his life where his dad had been.
“What they don’t tell you about losing a parent is that it’s a lot of work,” Dylan said.
As the only child of his mom and dad, who divorced when Dylan was young, he was the sole executor of his dad’s estate. He was immediately thrown headlong into legal matters and post-death tasks — like collecting his father’s clothes and belongings from the car that was totaled, sorting through his dad’s apartment and paperwork, and of course, letting friends and family know of the event — all with no time to process the loss.
Once all the formalities were taken care of, Dylan had only his own silent grief to wrestle with. Everyone else seemed to move on, but Dylan couldn’t understand that or even begin to move forward. With only a few days of paid time off, and without a great benefits plan, he had few resources for bereavement. Dylan was stuck.
“I started drinking a lot. I lost a lot of weight,” Dylan said. “I would often cry in private, and in public. I was so tired and sad. I was a ghost.”
The Last-Ditch
He scrolled through Twitter one day and found one person talking about how a Reddit support group board helped them through grief. Dylan wasn’t so sure about that. “I had personally known Reddit to be a toxic recess of the internet.”
But he was scared by how deep his pain ran, and he was ready to try anything. So he decided to check it out.
“I was taken aback by the number of people telling their stories of loss,” Dylan said. “And the amount of support each and every one of them received from the other members. I felt immediately connected to this group of strangers.”
He visited the page every day, sometimes for hours, and eventually he was ready to share his story. When he did, members supported him with loving and hopeful comments. They encouraged him that he would be okay, and that they would always be there for him.
“That’s when I knew that stumbling upon this little corner of the internet was the best thing that could have happened to me in my darkest moment,” Dylan said.
The Power of Storytelling
He wasn’t the only one with that experience. Countless other members described feeling the same support and solidarity on the Reddit group.
We weren’t made to experience grief by ourselves. We need each other to help us process, weep, ache, and mourn. We need stories of survival through the hardest and darkest moments. Because when we see that other people can survive such a devastation, we know there’s hope for own stories.
That’s why support groups, like GriefShare and Faith & Grief Ministries, are so powerful and helpful in healing from losing a loved one. These kinds of groups typically feature in-person gatherings, but for Dylan, that wasn’t a good fit. Though he was skeptical at first, Dylan found the right tone, time, and pace for his grieving process in that Reddit community.
“…Talking to people how know exactly what I’m feeling has taken me from having no hope to officially being on the mend,” Dylan wrote. “Grief is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, but online, we somehow all feel equal.”
Resources for the Journey Ahead
As a funeral director, your work is on the front end of the grieving process for families. But you can give clients so many resources for the journey ahead of them. Local, in-person support groups are helpful, but may be hard to come by these days, with various COVID-19 lockdowns in place. Online communities can be just as effective. Here are a few you could recommend:
- Grieving.com, one of the internet’s longest running support communities.
- GriefAnonymous.com utilizes Facebook Groups and has over 30,000 members.
- GriefInCommon.com offers a live chat feature as well as opportunities to meet in- person.
- GriefHealingDiscussionGroups.com provides specific bereavement topics and moderated discussions for safety and security.
- And don’t forget Reddit’s Grief Support: Learning to Live Without.
Find more at VeryWellMind.com.
Don’t underestimate the healing power of online communities. Because like Dylan said, grief isn’t one-size-fits-all — and neither is healing.
