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“Aren’t you going to post something about Ginny on Facebook?” my father asked.

My parents had called a few hours earlier to tell me that our dog had unexpectedly gone into shock while they were away and had to be put down in a room of strangers. At 19, it was the first time in my adult life that I had experienced loss. The only words I could think of as I lay in bed were “I’m sorry.”

I was sorry that my parents were on vacation instead of in New Jersey with her, and that I was 3,500 miles away studying in Paris for the rest of the summer. For having been the kind of neurotic 7-year-old who did the math after his parents brought home a yellow Labrador puppy and hoped to be at some distant college on the day she died, not wanting to see her stop breathing or hobble out the back door for the last time. Now, I couldn’t stop apologizing for getting my wish, hoping to somehow absolve myself of the fact that I would never again get the chance to rub her ear and tell her that everything would be O.K.

Even my father, who made a point of showing his dislike for the inanities of social media, was looking to my Facebook status as a true representation of what I was feeling.

But my father’s phone call was a reminder that the world was still expecting something from me. In the past week alone, Chloë from my hometown and Scott from college had both eulogized their dogs with pensive Facebook statuses and Instagram collages, each garnering over 150 “likes” and dozens of condolences. They, too, were mourning the bond that forms between child and pet and acts as an anchor through puberty.



In the 12 years it had taken for Ginny’s puppy wrinkles to fill out and for her eyes to grow cloudy with age, she had witnessed nearly every episode of my life, from elementary school years of jeans with elastic waistbands to eighth-grade growth spurts, to the day I got accepted to college. Chloë and Scott were only the most recent of my friends who had marked the end of their childhoods with a tweet or a status — and now it was my turn. To make an R.I.P. post about Ginny was to secure her a spot in the chronicle of my life, to recognize — in words and pictures — that she mattered.

And it would be easy, too, I thought. When I joined Facebook in 2007, my first profile picture was a photograph of Ginny and me lying next to each other on my living room floor. I was sporting an eighth-grade mullet, and Ginny — with her fox-red hair not yet white near her nose — looked like how I wanted to remember her. It seemed fitting, as a few college classmates in search of my embarrassing middle school likeness had recently raided my Facebook albums and resurrected the photo.

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So I fiddled with the color contrast and skimmed an online version of “The Little Prince” in search of something meaningful to put for the caption. But as I tried to decide which aphorisms about roses and wheat fields were most profound, and which of those would go best with the picture, I realized that my memory of Ginny was already getting muddled by my own vanity. Part of the reason I was even considering making a post was because it simply seemed like the thing to do, and to do otherwise would seem callous. But when it came time to groom her image for Instagram, my anticipation of the likes and notifications that would inevitably follow — and the idea of capitalizing on my dog’s death — made me squirm.

Everyone expresses grief in different ways, and some of my best friends have used an R.I.P. post to pay a last tribute to pets, grandparents, and friends gone too soon. But I, like a lot of people I know, have a bad habit of fussing over how I appear on Facebook in ways that would be impossible in real time. Would people think I was overemotional or, even worse, fishing for pity? I was so used to curating a persona, to tinkering with statuses and comments and profile pictures — how was I supposed to post about Ginny without getting tangled in my own self-absorption?

In the days after I learned that my dog was gone, the last thing I wanted to think about was how I appeared to others. I wanted to feel something, to immerse myself in the reality that I would never again see her face peering out the front window as I drove into the garage. What if, after two months, it would no longer seem strange to come home from France without hearing a four-legged kerfuffle just behind the front door? I was finally spending a summer studying abroad — something I had been planning for years — yet I couldn’t help but worry that the whirlwind of pastries and class trips to Dijon was going to numb me to the events in my life that really mattered. So I made myself think about the day we first got Ginny. About the countless times I yelled at her for barking at the doorbell. About the scrabble of her nails against the floor as she ran to the kitchen whenever she heard me open the fridge, furrowing her brow and tilting her head as if she knew it made her cuter. If I couldn’t be there for her, the least I could do was try to feel her absence more keenly.

“Did you just not care about her that much?” my father asked earnestly when I told him that I had chosen not to post the way my older brother had. This was coming from the man who had always made a point of showing his dislike for the inanities of social media, and yet he too had started looking to my Facebook status as a true representation of what I was feeling. For the rest of the world, it seemed, my grief wasn’t real until it could be screenshot.

At the time, it was like I was being pushed on stage to perform my grief in front of a 700-person virtual audience, when all I wanted was to sit in my room with the shades down and go through old iPhoto albums from Ginny’s puppy years. But ultimately, I decided to take a moment of undocumented, un-hashtagged time for myself. Though I didn’t receive the public condolences that might have validated my sorrow, there was something refreshing about experiencing a significant event in my life on my own terms rather than in a virtual panopticon of my peers.

I never did make an R.I.P. post marking when Ginny left my life, but her shadow still dwells in the corners where she slept and in the silences after the doorbell rings. That was record enough. As a college student, I spend so much effort trying to condense my identity into coherent narratives, in cover letters and internship applications and Facebook timelines, but I’ve realized now that sometimes it’s O.K. to be a mess without a story.

Spencer Bokat-Lindell is a junior at Yale University in the Journalism Initiative and a contributor to Montclair Magazine.