Parasocial grief and why I can grieve Matthew Perry
Photo by Tim Marshall
Academics and clinicians love to break down concepts into component parts. These parts then can take on lives of their own.
I’m not a fan of how grief is continually being broken into parts. Ambiguous grief. Anticipatory grief. Abbreviated grief. Absent grief.
A few that really get me going: Disenfranchised grief (when is grief ever, really, enfranchised?). Complicated grief (isn’t it, almost always, a big mess?). Prolonged grief (and yet, to quote filmmaker Ken Burns, “the half-life of grief is endless”).
The other day I came across a grief term that was new to me and gave me pause. It was written in a comment to a LinkedIn post by Meghan Riordan Jarvis (therapist, speaker, podcaster). Jarvis wrote a post about Matthew Perry a few days after he died: “We have parasocial relationships with celebrities. That just means they are one sided. We care about Matthew, but he doesn’t get the chance to care about us back.”
Jarvis counseled those people feeling what has become labeled – and what was specified in a comment to her post – ‘parasocial grief’: “Don’t shame yourself if you are grieving… Don’t be afraid to mourn. It doesn’t make you ridiculous, it makes you a person who cares.”
The idea behind parasocial grief first came to my attention via the work of sociologist, Tony Walter. In 1999, Walter edited The Mourning for Diana (Routledge), a book focused on the public reaction to the death of Princess Diana. The events that followed Diana’s death marked one of the first time that public mourning was widely ‘mediatized’ – that is, covered by, but also actively shaped by, tabloids, television, and radio reporting. While her death was before social media, an adoring public was still able to build their community from strangers, all sharing one-sided relationships with the princess. Walter’s book does not feature the term parasocial grief, however; the term has come into fashion since then, with scholars and clinicians finding a utility in labeling it such.
I’m usually quick to scoff at celebrities and their adoring fans. But Matthew Perry? Here’s where I’m a hypocrite: Matthew Perry is not just a generic celebrity to me. I can fashion a more personal connection: He is from my generation. As with many Canadians, I can mark less than six degrees of separation from him, knowing someone who went to his high school. He has been in my house – well, not really him but it feels like it. His book with his face is on my coffee table, and his voice had been telling his story via the talk show circuit to promote it. And of course, seasons and seasons of Friends, the phraseology having become part of my family’s lexicon (Could I BE any more hungry?).
Yet, it hadn’t occurred to me that I could grieve Matthew Perry. Perhaps I’d read too many snarky X (Twitter) comments about the ridiculousness of pausing to remark on celebrity deaths when the world is going to hell in a handbasket for ‘real’ reasons (Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, climate change). And perhaps I was ‘policing’ my own right to grieve (another brilliant Walter insight).
Should I re-think my response to Sinead O’Connor’s recent death as well? Celebrities can leave holes in our lives, ones that we will trip over – even fall into – when their songs come on the radio, or when we bump into late-night re-runs. Maybe we should pause and reflect on those holes. Holes represent an absence; we can feel an absence of someone we never really knew.
This LinkedIn post reinforces my desire to cut through labels and, instead, think of grief as grief – parasocial or simply social. Grief signals that people have a capacity to care. That’s what matters. And that gives us all permission to grieve Matthew Perry.
