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Death, online by Azania Imtiaz Khatri-Patel
A couple of weeks ago, I read a heartbreaking Twitter thread. A woman, living in Karachi, tweeted about receiving a text from someone she had dated a few years back in New York. Her ex-boyfriend’s father had just passed, and he was not going to make it back to Pakistan in time for the funeral. As he wasn’t on the best of terms with the rest of his family, this years-ago girlfriend was his only hope to get a last glance at his father’s mortal remains.
She obliged, and the man was able to bid his father goodbye over FaceTime- and in our connected yet distant world, it is a story of modern grief and mourning. This isn’t a story in isolation, over the past years, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, death, and funerals have had a digital turn.
In 2021, there was a spate of articles describing people’s first experiences of a ‘zoom funeral’ and advice on the etiquette for attending someone’s last rites online. It also meant a new industry dedicated to taking death online spawned. And older operations, that were meant to bring ex-pats and diasporas closer to their grieving communities, ironically received a new lease on life.
One such example is Karachi’s Wadi-a-Hussain. The cemetery for Shia Muslims launched an online service in 2001, a solid two decades before the worst of the pandemic deaths. The cemetery's then custodian, Mohammad Zaid had said that the service would make Wadi-a-Hussain the subcontinent’s first online graveyard. By allotting each grave an ‘ID’ and allowing users to log in and view the grave in real time- it would give mourners who could not be present in person a chance to grieve.
Twenty-odd years and an enforced period of isolation later, for some, this odd way of grieving has become the only viable option.