54 SEPTEMBER 2019 | TOWNANDCOUNTRYMAG.COM
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
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Acceptable number of black or broken heart
emojis to include in a caption. It’s a death,
not a meme.1
Number of respectful posts you are allowed
if you didn’t know the deceased. Preferably
accompanying a Richard Avedon portrait.N/2 + 7
Use the Half Your Age and Add Seven rule
when weighing the pros and cons of a sel-
fie with the recently departed. It’s a move
reserved for intimates, not acquaintances.24
Hours you must wait before posting, so as not
to scoop the family. Also applies to calling to
offer condolences. “Even if it’s awkward, a
note promotes a more emotional connection,”
says Daniel Post Senning of the Emily Post
Institute. “It says you made an effort.”100,000
Follower count required for anyone to really
care about your In Memoriam post. The Mis-
shapes just missed the cut when they eulo-
gized Karl Lagerfeld—and they threw in black
and broken heart emojis for good measure.INSTA-GRIEVING
BY THE NUMBERS
A few pointers for online
mourning.said, “Que sera sera.”
For those who follow society deaths the
way some people follow wedding announce-
ments, the Instagram response to the demise
of the famously discreet Jayne Wrightsman
seemed particularly grave-spinning. It wasn’t
the post about Wrightsman that likened her
end to the fire at Notre-Dame, or even the
ones by decorators that featured promotional
pictures of her 18th-century wallpaper (“I had
it copied for a client’s bedroom,” one wrote),
as if she had no soul or loved ones, just taste.
It was the one about how Wrightsman’s chauf-
feur was the partner of the poster’s butler,
and that Wrightsman didn’t make things
difficult for them during seasonal moves to
Palm Beach and London. “She was always
very kind,” read the comment. Good to know.
Even intimates of the deceased feel pres-
sure to join the communal outpouring. When
her mother-in-law died earlier this year, Car-
ole Radziwill didn’t plan to pay her respects
on social media. “I wasn’t going to post any-
thing, because I was personally mourning
Lee’s passing,” she tells T&C. But her Twitter
and Instagram followers shared condolences
on the platforms anyway, and questioned why
she wasn’t acknowledging the death herself,
so in the end she posted a simple black-and-
white portrait with the caption “She Was
Loved.” “I didn’t want to make a statement
by not making a statement,” she says. “Insta-
gram just wasn’t a place to process my real
grief,” she says.
Inès de la Fressange, the famous Lager-
feld muse, felt the same way and didn’t post
on the day of his death. “It was really not my
mood,” she tells me. But she also felt pres-
sure to respond. “Sometimes I’m surprised
by all these RIPs,” she adds, noting that the
abbreviation has recently invaded France on
social media. “Years ago families in villages
would have glued posters on the walls or
announced the death in newspapers. Now
it takes a different form.”
When Emily Post was alive, the rules were
simpler. She advised the bereft to draw the
shades and avoid ostentatious fashions. Her
great-great-grandson Daniel Post Senning, of
the Emily Post Institute, notes that etiquette
issues around death still preoccupy people
almost as much as weddings. He now con-
tends with a climate that permits selfies at
funerals (President Barack Obama caused a
small uproar when he posed for one during
Nelson Mandela’s memorial) and the kind
of weeping emojis Paris Hilton used when
mourning her makeup artist, Jake Bailey, afew years ago. “Death is a time to listen to
that little voice of discretion that sometimes
goes awry,” Post Senning says. “And there are
times when it is better to say nothing.”
If only the singer Lily Allen had heard him.
After the death of Prince, Rita Ora tweeted
her sincere memories of the late pop icon,
recalling their dance-offs and laughs. Allen
commented, “pics or it never happened,” and
her feed was immediately filled with responsescalling her out for her flippant bad taste and
too-soon crudeness. Her apology, explaining
that she was only jealous that Ora had met
her idol, didn’t help matters, and eventually
she just tweeted, “Oh my the Internet.”
The episode made the online sniping
about George and Barbara Bush’s Republi-
can politics after they died look benign.
Even judging how social media mourners
behave can get you in trouble. Bret Easton
Ellis earned the wrath of Twitter when he
wrote about J.D. Salinger: “Yay!! He’s finally
dead.” “It was a joke, performance art, but
it was the first time I realized social media
wasn’t good for that,” says Ellis, whose new
book of essays, White, deals in part with knee-
jerk indignation and woke culture. Still, he
adds, he doesn’t regret the tweet.
Of course, for every misstep social media
inspires, there are happy endings. Memorial
sites like Legacy and Dignitymemorial.com
can save families from the high cost of paid
newspaper obituaries, and posts that lin-
ger can help mourners keep the deceased
in mind for years. In addition, putting up
cheeky videos of the dearly departed, as Alex-
andra Lebenthal did in 2014 of her father’s
vintage mutual bond–selling TV commer-
cials, lets friends and strangers know about
the quirks and personalities of loved ones.
“I don’t judge posting anything as show-
boating, because I might also be inclined
to comment about any kind of connection
I’ve had,” says Gail Rubin, whose TED talk
on grieving has earned her the nickname
“the Doyenne of Death.” “But there is often
a fine line between communal grieving and
self-promotion.”
Bob Colacello would agree. Having been
an early editor at Andy Warhol’s Interview
magazine, he could fill his Instagram feed with
remembrances of bygone icons at a moment
when they are falling one after another. When
Radziwill died, he posted that he regretted not
having spent more time with her in recent
years, the sort of candor that’s usually missing
from frenzied social media eulogies.
“She used to hang out with me and Andy,”
he says. “But I spoke to Karl Lagerfeld only a
few times, so why would I write about some-
one I didn’t know?”
It’s hard to guess whether the sharp-
tongued couturier would have cared either
way. When his longtime enemy Pierre Bergé
died, Lagerfeld considered sending a cactus to
the funeral. We’ll never know if he followed
through with the prickly gesture—he didn’t
Instagram it.