Has the pandemic made us turn to social media to process grief?
Its from crying.  Early in her book, Notes On Grief, written during the weeks following the death of her father, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie confronts the physicality of grief. She did not know, she tells us, that we cry with our muscles. That grief is tangible in the metallic taste on our tongue, a weight on our chest, and a sense of dissolving in our gut. Even without the prose styling of an accomplished writer, most of us already know this. If not in this year, monopolised by COVID-19, then at some point before that, we have probably felt this way. We know that mourning a loved one is a full-body experience. It affects the way we eat and sleep, the way we breathe. Even skin shows emotion by misbehaving. How we grieve  Since mourning is such a physical act, the way we comfort mourners has always been physical as wellsitting in proximity to them, singing or chanting, cooking for them. Gayatri Jayaraman, a Mumbai-based author and mind-body-spirit therapist, puts it in psychological terms for me: Individually, we each bear grief differently, but funerals have always been about ritualised social mourning. It allows us to express somatic, social and religious idioms of distress that then enable us to receive the help we need, whether food, or finances, or care for children or the elderly.  This is not just the African or Asian way. French medievalist Philippe Aris wrote that unlike the subdued Western funerals of today, with their emphasis on keeping grief private, in the Middle Ages in Europe, grief was expressed in an unrestrained way that was cathartic and communally shared. The outpouring of emotion was often performed ceremonially, in the form of ritualised weeping by keeners in Ireland and Scotland, similar to the rudaalis of Rajasthan. Public mourning is essential for reminding ourselves that though we are vulnerable, our sense of collective continuity preserves uswe regain, through shared memory, some sense of immortality for our loved ones and ourselves, Jayaraman tells me. When we get onto social media with our grief while in isolation, it is perhaps this consolation and reminder that we seek. Console, condole and mournonline  With the pandemic and consequent social-distancing, we have lost the traditional channels of giving and receiving comfort.