The Obituary Filter: Why We Only Love People When They Can’t Fact-Check Us
The internet is currently drowning in performance. We rent black ties, upload grainy eulogies, and cry on cue for people we actively ghosted when they were still breathing. This is the ritual of what I call Fake Mourning.
The scene is always the same: A death is announced, and suddenly, everyone on the timeline was their closest friend. The second the casket drops, the anecdotes explode, the parties, the punch-lines, the playlists they hated. The reality of a difficult, flawed human is instantly replaced by a sanitized saint.
The True Nostalgia Pass
Why does this happen? The reason is simple, cynical, and universally true: The dead can’t fact-check.
They won’t call you out for skipping their chemo drives, won’t remind the group chat that you laughed at their bad karaoke, and definitely won’t contradict the narrative you’re now weaving about your "unbreakable bond." Death wipes the slate clean, turning complex, challenging humans into easy, two-dimensional saints. It gives the rest of us a guilt-free nostalgia pass.
The Burden of the Living
The living, however, are a burden. We have to judge them in real time.
We mute their political rants, unfollow their drama, and roll our eyes at their mid-life crisis convertible. Loving them requires active, inconvenient effort. Mourning them feels like work because celebrating them felt like an obligation when they were here.
So we wait. We let the obituary do the heavy lifting. We wait for the timeline to become a safe space for grief. Then, we flood it with heart emojis and generic “gone too soon” “ooh what a shock” captions, a display of sanitized affection that costs nothing. Every candle-light vigil becomes, in a subtle way, a victory lap: “Look how much I cared... now that it’s convenient and they can’t ask for anything.”
Celebrate the Living First
If we truly want to honor people, we need to retire this fake, filter-heavy grief. We need to shift the effort from the burial to the birthday.
Next time someone you care about is still here, try this:
Send the flowers today, not to the funeral home next week.
Play their terrible playlist while they’re still here to complain about the track order.
Tell them the stories to their face and watch them correct every wrong detail.
That’s the only mourning that isn’t fake. Everything else is just Instagram for ghosts.
Comments
Post a Comment