Nope.
The second group is full of images with“Heaven gained an angel, but I lost my heart.”plastered in Comic Sans over fields of tulips or heavens with angel wings.
Nope.
The third is a stream of sobbing emojis and guilt-soaked confessions that make me wonder if I should feel worse about the kind of wife I was when he was alive.
“I should’ve let him get the boat. He wanted a boat. I said no. Now he’s dead. No boat.”
Next comes“Sometimes I told him the dishwasher was broken so he’d wash the dishes by hand. It wasn’t broken.”
Then, without warning: “He died thinking I liked his mother. I did NOT.”
I click my way out of the groups, feeling worse than when I started.
Instead, I open the general feed and begin what my daughter warned me is a doom scroll. She told me it would be tempting but to try to fight the urge for as long as possible. If the alternative is to pour my heart out in grief groups, I will gladly take the doom scrolling. If nothing else, I can tell Harper I gave the social media world a try, and we weren’t compatible.
And then I see her.
She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor of what looks like a man cave that collided, perhaps reluctantly, with a yoga studio. There’s a neon “Beer” sign unplugged in the corner, half-covered by a leaning full-length mirror framed in gold. An old dartboard hangs above a Himalayan salt lamp. One wall is still painted a deep hunter green, but a tapestry with an abstract sun-and-moon design is tacked unevenly across it, trying its best to soften the space. A yoga mat is rolled out beside a pair of dumbbells, and what might have once been a minibar now holds candles, succulents, and a stack of self-help books with titles likeRadical AcceptanceandThe Art of Stillness.
She’s wearing a bright orange sweater and glittery eye patches under her eyes, hair piled in a messy bun like she gave up halfway through making it presentable. She’s surrounded by paint cans and brushes, trying to DIY a bookshelf, squinting at the instructions, swearing softly when a screw rolls away.
In the corner of the screen, her husband appears in a stitched-in throwback video, laughing uncontrollably in a much older clip as she fumbles with a different piece of furniture. His voice, warm and teasing, fills the room for a second, “Ithink the instructions might really be useful here, babe,” and her shoulders instinctively lift toward the sound.
The caption reads:Don’t worry, I’m still messing up furniture without you.
It’s oddly moving.
I click on her profile, ThisIsUs. Her bio unapologetically proclaims:Wife. Yoga enthusiast. Documenter of our adventures.
Instead of a page dedicated to grief and regret, her page seems to do the opposite. It screams of over-the-top life. Like she’s trying to tell the world, or maybe herself, that he’s not really gone. Not yet.
I scroll back through her content, watching the slow unraveling of a life lived in tandem. In the early videos, she’s with her husband. He’s tall, bearded, with the kind of playful energy that makes you like him immediately. They go on hikes and road trips, try viral dance trends they’re clearly too old for, burn sourdough, and make jokes about kombucha explosions. There’s love in every frame, even when they’re bickering over GPS directions.
And then he’s gone.
Not all at once, but slowly. The footage grows quieter. The camera lingers longer on her face. Sometimes she overlays a current video of herself with an old one of the two of them, like she’s trying to keep him in the frame a little longer. Or maybe she’s trying to keep herself from slipping out of it entirely.
Before I can second guess myself, I’m liking the video with the furniture and forcing my fingers to tap across the screen:
@ThisIsUs: A few months ago an end table my husband ordered before he died finally showed up. I left it in the corner for weeks while I cried. Pretty sure it’s still in the garage. I’ve made peace with not having a nightstand.
I’m about to end my doom scroll, thumb twitching toward the home button, resolve setting in to delete this whole app and pretend I never tried, when another video catches my eye. It’squieter than the others, no music, no face, just the still shot of a knitted blanket folded neatly on top of a queen bed. The camera holds steady. Then a soft, steady voice says, “Today, I let the sadness stay. And then I vacuumed.”
That’s it. That’s the whole video. No clever transitions. No hashtags. Simple honesty.
And for some reason, it undoes me. My throat tightens. My eyes sting.
I don’t know why it makes me cry. Maybe because I vacuumed yesterday. Maybe because the sadness stayed then, too.
Or maybe because it’s the first time someone’s admitted that grief doesn’t always roar. It hums. It lingers in mundane chores, quiet rooms, and in the way we try to put ourselves back together in the middle of it all.
I click on the profile: BooksAndYarn. The videos are few and simple—hands, yarn, a ton of knitting projects, the occasional stack of books by a sunny window. In one, a kettle whistles softly in the background while she completes row after row with her knitting needles.
Her hands move methodically in the frame, looping sunshine yellow yarn through her fingers with a kind of reverence. Like each stitch is its own breath. Like she’s mending something I can’t see. Maybe something in herself.
I stare at her page until I feel the late afternoon sun fade into evening.
