Family Tragedy and Twitter

More and more everyday we, as a society, are always looking for the quickest and easiest way to spread information. Right now, as you’re reading, I’m spreading information about a woman who is being harassed because she tweeted about her son’s death.

There are many things about this story that I don’t like. There are two issues here. Whether or not an accident could have been prevented and whether or not it was appropriate that a mother should choose to share her tragedy on Twitter. That she left the checking on a two-year-old to an 11-year-old instead of checking herself, not ensuring that a pool enclosure wasn’t secured herself…but when it comes to pools I’ve found that no matter what a parent does, accidents will happen. I cannot judge the pool incident because I wasn’t there, and accidents will happen no matter how much care and security and intuitiveness a parent has.

I can however offer an opinion on the mother tweeting about her son falling in the pool and, sadly, passing away.    

In June, I had a cat become ill and within an hour of bringing her to the vet, she was put to sleep. While one cannot compare losing a child with losing a cat, both are still (to those involved) tragedies. As I was leaving for the vet, I facebooked that I was running Frick to the vet and let’s hope it’s nothing serious. While I was at the vet and waiting for the vet to let me know what was wrong, I facebooked from my Blackberry that I was really super worried about my Pretty Girl. When the vet came in and said that Frick was very ill and would likely die within the next few days, I jumped back on my Blackberry and called a friend to let her talk to the vet because I was absolutely stunned. After it was all over, I got in my car and facebooked again that Frick was now with the kitty angels. As soon as I got home, I looked  for a couple of pictures of Frick to post on my Facebook so that my friends could see who my Pretty Girl was.

Yeah, I know. It’s just a cat. But for me, my cats are everything. As much as I love my cats and as much as I loved Frick, does that make me a bad person for having kept friends up-to-date on what was happening with her? I wouldn’t think so. Should this woman be considered less of a mother because she chose to let her friends and family know what had happened to her son using Twitter? I definitely don’t think so.

We now live in an age when people don’t have to sit making 27 phone calls to report the same news over and over again. Reliving the tragedy in detail over and over again. We can make a single post about an event, request privacy during the difficult period, and then set about making those 27 phone calls when we’ve had a moment to compose ourselves and are better able to carry on a conversation.

Many comments on this article and some comments within the article make it sound as though the mother had been tweeting non-stop about what had happened to her son that day. Think about any time you’ve ever had to sit in a waiting room. You sit and sit and sit and wait and wait and wait. My thought is this: for this woman (if she had been tweeting the whole time), Twitter became  a therapeutic outlet for sharing with friends and family what had happened. A coping mechanism. Kinda like no different than if she’d been on the phone calling friends and family to let them know what’d happened.

So I’ll be curious to see what you do the next time something tragic happens and you want to let as many people at once know about it. Will you be phoning? Will you be tweeting? New age, new technology. Deal with it.