Announcing a death on social media

A post reaches everyone at once, which is its value and its risk. The risk is that "everyone" includes people who should have heard it from you.

Tell the close circle first

Before anything is posted, somebody needs to have spoken to:

• immediate family, including the relatives nobody speaks to;
• closest friends, including the ones who are not on any platform;
• their workplace, if they were working;
• anyone who was caring for them, or who they were caring for.

This takes a day, and it is a day well spent. Learning of a death from a feed, when you were close to the person, is a specific kind of wound that people remember for years.

Divide the list between two or three people. Nobody should make thirty of these calls alone.

What to write

Short. A post is an announcement, not a eulogy — the tribute comes later, and will be better for the delay.

It is with great sadness that we let you know that our mother, Margaret Whitfield, died on Tuesday morning. She was surrounded by her family.

The funeral will be at St Mary's on the 3rd at 11am. Everyone who knew her is welcome.

We will reply to messages when we can. Thank you for your patience.

That last line is worth including. It sets an expectation and spares the family the guilt of an unanswered inbox at the worst possible week.

What to be careful with

Photographs of other people. A family picture posted publicly includes relatives who have not agreed to it, sometimes children.

The cause of death. It is not owed to anyone. Once posted it cannot be retracted, and for a suicide or an overdose the consequences for surviving family are lasting. If you say nothing, no explanation is required.

Dates and addresses. A public post giving a funeral time and the family home address tells a stranger exactly when that house will be empty. Give the venue, not the house.

Whose account it is. Posting from the deceased person's own account startles people badly. If it has to be done, open with the fact that someone else is writing.

Afterwards

Comments will arrive for weeks, and among them will be the thing families do not expect: stories. People who worked with them, went to school with them, were helped by them once in 1994.

Those stories are the most valuable thing the post produces, and they are also the most fragile — they sit in a comment thread that nobody can search in three years, on a platform that may change its mind about old posts.

Copy them out. A family that spends an hour saving those comments ends up with the one record of that person written by people outside the family, and there is no other way to get it.