Freeman Brothers was first established as a funeral director in Horsham, West Sussex, in 1855. The company continues to remain independent and family-run, and now has a further three offices across the county – in Billingshurst, Crawley and Hurstpierpoint. A lot has changed since Freeman Brothers first opened, with technology and celebrity culture being significant links. Becky explores how these impact our relationships with death…
This isn’t the first time we’ve shared thoughts via our blog on the phenomenon of grieving celebrities – people we didn’t know first-hand – and it’s a topic which continues to shift as technology evolves. Within recent memory, we may have read in a newspaper or seen via television news that someone high-profile had died, and we might have noticed ourselves experiencing familiar feelings in that moment, but this has become heightened in both strength and frequency for many people.
Our relationship with the wider world has changed significantly in recent years, due to changes in the way we consume media. Reality TV and the culture of celebrity has shifted enormously with the rise of social media. Whilst technology has made leaps and bounds, the human brain moves at a steadier pace, and although we know that we don’t know celebrities in the same way that we do our friends, it can feel as though we have a similar relationship due to the amount that is shared about their lives.
Even if you’re not a social media user, and develop a relationship with celebrities in this way, culture and public figures impact our lives. We see this via one specific example in the funeral industry – many of our customers will tell us that they’re choosing a particular song as it reminds them of the person who has died, and that it will therefore be meaningful for them during the service. The same can be said for photographs and poems that people choose to share.
We might feel a strong personal association to a piece of music, or even a film or a book, as we first encountered it during a particularly impactful time in our lives. If the person who created it then dies, we may feel that we have lost an important connection to that pivotal moment, having been grateful for them sharing their work.
Parasocial relationships can even be as simple as relating to someone who is part of our peer group. Often, particularly for those who are born into a famous family, such as royalty, live their key milestones in the spotlight, and this means that stages such as sitting public exams, passing their driving test, or getting married are documented heavily, and can give us cause for comparison. It can then mean that, when someone who is a similar age to ourselves dies, we are given pause for thought on the nature of life and death, meeting with this particular reality in a unique way. This could be particularly profound for those who are younger – with many of us living later into adulthood and still having living grandparents, we might not experience a close bereavement in our physical circle until we are quite a bit older. This in turn can mean that we have a limited experience of death, and there is then an additional shock when someone we regarded as a peer dies.
Additionally, in our current age of social media, there can be criticism of those who perceive themselves to be bereaved when they did not have a ‘real life’ relationship with the person who has died. What it’s important to remember is that, whilst someone who did have direct contact with someone who has died may be impacted differently to someone who did not, this is not always the case. Not everyone has immediate family – something that we will revisit via next week’s piece – and all of our circumstances are different. Increasing numbers of people live alone, which can mean that their digital or distant relationships matter to them in a way that varies from our own experience.
What matters most is that we have compassion for those around us, and recognise that emotional impacts occur in a variety of ways, not just when something happens within our immediate circle.
