Twitter is a very public medium, one that began as a venue for professional debates, celebrity self-promotion, and real-time news. But the service has been finding its way into ever-more-intimate moments of our lives – our weddings our breakups, the birth of our children – and now seems to be emerging as a nascent channel for public grieving as well.
In July, NPR host Scott Simon made headlines after tweeting his mother’s final weeks, medical struggle, and death. Then last Thursday, journalist Spencer Ackerman posted a remarkable series of heartfelt and revealing tweets commemorating his mother Bette Lynne Cohen, who passed away the same day after a seven-year struggle with cancer. She was 62.
Ackerman, a former WIRED staffer who now covers national security for The Guardian, spent 14 tweets memorializing not only his mother’s loves — the Yankees, “Little” Steven Van Zandt — but also her rebellions. She lied to the Army to get her brother home from Vietnam, Ackerman wrote, and smuggled Native American activist Leonard Peltier into Canada in a boat. Then there was this:
(Ackerman’s full series of tweets is embedded below.) The reaction, from friends, family, and strangers alike, was swift and powerful. Retweets and “faves” poured in by the dozen. NFL great Donte Stallworth sent a supportive note. A cousin on Facebook encouraged Ackerman to post more, as did Ackerman’s friend and WIRED editor Noah Shachtman, now at Foreign Policy, when he implored his own Twitter followers to “Stop what you're doing and read the timeline of @attackerman, who's recounting his mother's remarkable life.” Ackerman’s Twitter eulogy underlined the potency of public online remembrance, and it’s the public nature of such eulogies that sets them apart. It’s common to see a friend or family member posting about a dead relative on Facebook, a closed network whose relative privacy encourages the sharing of sensitive life moments. The difference with Twitter is that it’s a platform for sharing a piece of a deceased loved one with the entire world.
Ackerman says he began tweeting about his mother mainly for mechanical reasons; Twitter, where Ackerman has more than 40,000 followers, was an obvious way to communicate his situation to all his friends at once. He didn’t anticipate the public support and encouragement he received, which helped ease the pain of an incredibly difficult day, both for himself and for family gathered at the hospital, with whom he shared his tweets and the replies. “This was a kind of just devastating day for me emotionally,” Ackerman says. “One of the few things that was giving me something of a positive uplift was seeing random people and journalists and other professional people… whom my mother would never have met, who were appreciative and desirous of hearing about the details of her life. And that just made me feel really encouraged on a tough day.”
Ackerman had worried that his revelations of his mother’s lawbreaking, in particular, might provoke a backlash. He was “shocked,” heartened, and grateful when no such backlash materialized. Indeed, the development and maturation of the Twitter audience is every bit as important as the evolution of tweeters. For more tender moments like Ackerman's eulogy to end up on Twitter, the network needs not only brave storytellers like Ackerman but open-minded and respectful listeners like Ackerman's followers. On a service famous for its mocking and its angry exchanges, it's heartening just how many such listeners seem to be out there. "It was just a really nice moment and I really appreciate everyone who read the account of her life and decided not to criticize me," Ackerman says. "That was very nice of people and I appreciated it."
