My dad died on a September afternoon, while I was going through the motions of another boring lunch shift as the maître d' at a bougie hotel restaurant in the Financial District of New York City. It was the kind of place where most of the customers were rich, white Wall Street dudes who liked to remind you of how small you were, hurling insults about your life trajectory when you couldn't get them a table. I tolerated that shit for almost three years.

Every day, I stood at the front podium in a cheap suit, leaning occasionally (which wasn't allowed) and checking my phone when my manager wasn’t looking. Mostly, I fantasized about quitting and going home. On that particular day, I remember wanting to get home so badly I didn’t even change out of my work clothes at the end of my shift. I just walked out and hurried to my train.

As I sat in my seat, staring out the window, I had no idea that my dad was dead. As it turned out, he had been for a few hours already.

I walked into my apartment, hugged my girlfriend, and attempted to de-stress. She suggested we order take-out, which I was more than happy to do. I was too tired to even think about making dinner. A while later, my girlfriend picked up a call and told me we had visitors downstairs. She went down to let them in; I figured it was the delivery person.

She came back inside, my mom and little sister following behind. I was confused, but also pleasantly surprised. I hadn’t seen them in weeks. My unsuspecting girlfriend thought she was helping to plan a nice impromptu evening with my family (hence the takeout suggestion), but that wasn’t quite the case. That’s when my mom sat me down and told me what had happened.

The short story: My dad had been in a car accident. He suffered a heart attack behind the wheel, crashed, and didn’t make it out. No warning, no slow burn — he was gone, just like that.

I don’t remember exactly how I reacted, but I recall pure numbness. I cried a bit, but mostly I felt like it wasn’t really happening, like I was on the world’s cruelest prank show and somebody was about to tell me it was all a hoax. Of course, that never happened.

What they don’t tell you about losing a parent is that it’s a lot of work. Forget time to process. If your parent was in a wreck like my dad was, you have to make trips to the police station to collect their tattered clothes and a random assortment of belongings. You have to go to their apartment and sort through all of their stuff like you're on some fucked up HGTV program. You become inundated with sympathetic phone calls and texts that you barely ever get around to answering. You learn your capacity for pain. You have to tell your grandparents that their son is now dead.

My parents had been divorced since the beginning of my life. My dad never remarried, and my sister is technically my half-sister (I was there when she was born, so even saying "half" feels weird) with no relation to my father. That made me the sole executor of his estate. That meant I had to do all of this on my own, with a little logistical help from my mom and stepfather.

All the while, I had to reckon with the fact that at 22 years old, right at the start of my post-grad adult life, I had lost my dad. I didn’t even get to prepare. Not that it makes it any better, but if he had been sick, maybe I could have said goodbye. Instead, I was left to think about how his last moments were alone in that car. Was he afraid? Did he feel any pain? Was he thinking of me?

Countless emotional breakdowns, a few more trips to his apartment, and one funeral later, it was over. People stopped talking about what had happened. They moved on — but I couldn’t. I understood why it all seemed to fade out of existence for everyone else. It wasn’t their dad.

All there was left for me to do was to pick up the pieces and try to keep going.

It turns out that healing from traumatic grief can be difficult, especially without decent health insurance. Being a restaurant worker, other than a small bit of paid time off, I didn’t have a great benefits plan, and paying out of pocket for a therapist wasn't in the cards for me. I didn’t have the courage to go to an IRL grief counseling group (mostly due to social anxiety), and I wasn't fully aware of the other resources available to those coping with grief — like mental health apps, online services, and pay-what-you-wish therapists.

It was a tough spot to be in.

It got messy. I started drinking a lot. I lost a lot of weight. I would often cry in private, and in public. I was so tired and sad. I was a ghost. I had a single voicemail from my dad left on my phone that I listened to on repeat. It was nine seconds long. He told me that he loved me and to give him a call back so we could catch up on things. That voicemail was music to me. All I wanted was to hear him again.

I felt that I didn’t have many avenues to take, and I was scared of just how down I was. And it was only getting worse. I reached out to my partner, my friends, my family — they showered me with love and support, but it only felt like a Band-Aid. No one in my life fully understood what I was feeling, and why would they?

At some point, I had come across someone on Twitter talking about using Reddit support group boards to get through their grieving process. It seemed weird to me, especially because I had personally known Reddit to be a toxic recess of the internet. But I was kind of out of options at that point. So, I made an account and logged on.

What I found on Reddit wasn’t at all what I was expecting. I was taken aback by the number of people telling their stories of loss, and the amount of support each and every one of them received from the other members. I felt immediately connected to this group of strangers, many of them posting old pictures of their deceased loved ones, sharing anecdotes about their daily struggles with coping, and waxing poetic about how shitty they felt. They came from all walks of life and had experienced wildly different losses — parents, siblings, children, pets, friends. The thing that brought them together was that something important was now missing from their lives. I could relate.

I scrolled through the r/GriefSupport(opens in a new tab) subreddit for hours, revisiting it almost every day. It was the only part of my day when I felt normal. I started to branch out to other subs; r/Grieving(opens in a new tab) and r/bereavement(opens in a new tab) were ones I regularly found myself on. After some time, I felt ready to share my own story. And I did.

Other users flocked to my post, leaving supportive, loving comments and reminding me that one day I was going to feel OK (or at least more OK). And even if I didn’t, I’d have people there for me. I felt like it was the first time I could breathe in months. That’s when I knew that stumbling upon this little corner of the internet was the best thing that could have happened to me in my darkest moment.

It was the same for others, too.

A worthy alternative

“I was having grief counseling with a therapist from a children's hospice after my daughter died in November,” an anonymous r/GriefSupport user told me when I reached out in the process of writing this piece. “But I felt like I needed to speak directly to people who were going through the same thing I was. It's comforting in the worst way to know that there are tons of parents out there in the same boat; that have lost a child. But I am extremely comforted by the people online. No matter how far away they are, they know exactly how I'm feeling.”

For users of these support groups, reading the submissions from others and posting stories themselves wasn’t just a tool for coping, it was survival.

“I found that I wasn’t grieving every day. It was just moments on any random day that it hit me. Mostly at night,” another Reddit user, who lost his father last year, told me. “I wasn’t using self-pity purposefully, but I know I definitely went through the feelings of ‘why did this happen to my dad,’ ‘why me’ — seeing that others are experiencing a loss, too, helped me realize that although it’s a hurt I’ve never felt before, it is a part of life. Everyone is going to die someday. It’s just learning how to cope."

It’s easy to jump to the conclusion that online support groups don’t come close to the benefits that real-life therapy can offer, but that’s a misconception. In actuality, online grief support is not only a viable alternative to in-person groups, but in some ways, it can be better.

“You know, from a theoretical framing, one of the big things that we love about technology is the time component,” Natalie Pennington, a communication studies professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, told me during a phone interview. “So, if I have time to get comfortable with the group and those group norms, I’ll want to post. But also, I have time to think about what I want to say versus sitting in a room with a therapist. You're like, ‘OK, I'm paying you for the hour, I should start talking’; you don’t know what you want to say right away. But if you're crafting a message to post online, getting that time to sort of think through and carefully decide what to share or not share, that's huge."

The online setting also provides users with the opportunity to simply observe, as opposed to constantly sharing their thoughts, which can be a looming pressure within the context of IRL groups. It’s the same kind of social snacking we do when we scroll through Twitter, laughing at tweets quietly to ourselves without necessarily sharing any thoughts of our own. You still get some semblance of a connection, even if you’re not interacting in the same way as everyone else. There’s anonymity, and while in other online situations that might open the door for toxicity, in this instance it’s what makes people feel safe enough to be truthful about their experience. You get a larger sample size on the internet, a more varied demographic, and better odds that you’ll find someone you personally resonate with.

“For the same reasons that we say ‘never read the comments;’ that [online message boards] can be a hate-filled, terrible place because people feel like they don't have to abide by the same rules of polite society, that same mechanism of action works in the other direction,” author and grief activist Megan Devine told me in an interview. “People can actually be kinder, and more present, and more supportive than maybe they get to be in their real lives.” In other words, we all have our online personas, and some of us actually use that freedom of anonymity for good, rather than trolling. What a concept, right?

Another thing to take into account — and perhaps the most important of all — is how accessible online forums are to almost everyone. In-person therapy and support groups can boil down to a zip code lottery. The quality of care you receive depends heavily on where you live. The internet is less limited by geography, so you can find like-minded people from just about anywhere. Plus, it's available around the clock, allowing you to find help as soon as you feel you need it.

When you're lying in bed at three in the morning unable to sleep because you’re riddled with grief, someone is always there. This is vital for grieving people who have other time commitments and families to take care of; people who can’t just drop everything to attend their nearest IRL group session.

The barriers

We’re told again and again — by pop culture, pop psychology, and various spiritual platitudes on social media — that grief is a problem that needs to be solved rather than something that you can own and learn to live with. When you make your grief known, it’s like you’re admitting something is wrong with you rather than acknowledging a natural part of life.

Because of that, people are less willing to talk about it. Grief is a taboo, something to be embarrassed about. The world shames you, telling you to move on and get your shit together, to not be sad in the face of others. But grief, according to the experts, is an expression of love that we’ll all experience at some point, not a pathology.

You've probably heard about the five stages of grief, defined in 1969 by Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as a multi-phase path of denial, anger, depression, bargaining, and acceptance. This framework was actually designed as a palliative care model for people who were going through a terminal illness, and it’s meant to describe the range of emotions people experience prior to their death. Yet, it's often used as a go-to explanation for our post-loss process, thrown at grieving people time and time again to provide answers about what they’re feeling — often to the detriment of those dealing with grief.

Kübler-Ross’ five stages were never meant to ascribe reason to our experiences of losing a loved one, and they're not all that useful in coping with the kind of grief we’re talking about here, which is not a linear process, or something you experience on a predetermined timeline that ends in acceptance, new life, or compartmentalization of the deceased’s memory. Rather, it’s a relationship that we continue to renegotiate with our loved ones long after they’re gone.

Mental health experts commonly refer to this concept as the continuing bonds theory, which describes grief as a free-flowing concept rather than something you go through in specific steps. In other words, when you lose someone, you slowly find ways to adjust to your new relationship with them (that they’re no longer around). This is not an unhealthy way to grieve. In reality, according to the continuing bonds theory, these varying degrees of adjustment are an important part of the process that allow us to maintain our connection with our loved ones, even in their absence.

Grieving involves regularly switching between different modes of coping, often without you even realizing it. “This is what the dual-processing model expands on,” Dr. Erin Hope Thompson, a clinical psychologist and founder of The Loss Foundation, told me in another interview. “The two sides of grief processing fall under what is referred to as loss-oriented and restoration-oriented grief.”

“Things that make you think about your loved one and their death are called loss-oriented factors,” Thompson explained. “These are thoughts, feelings, actions, and events that make you focus on your grief and pain" — like thinking about how much you miss your loved one, looking at old photos, or referring to a memory. "Loss-oriented stressors can bring up lots of powerful emotions, such as sadness, loneliness, and anger," she said.

Comparatively, "restoration-oriented factors are things that let you get on with daily life and distract you from your grief for a while." They can include anything from picking up a new hobby to socializing or finding other ways to adapt to your new way of life. "Even for a few minutes, these thoughts and activities will allow you a small break from focusing on your pain," said Thompson.

You can see this oscillation play out in real-time within online support groups. Users go from posting about how they had their first good day in months, but the next day share that all they can think of is the person they lost; that they're rendered immobile by their sadness. It’s a roller coaster, but it’s a totally normal and healthy way to cope. “If we spent all our time in loss-oriented mode, we would never be able to move or get anything done,” Thompson expanded. “Equally, if we spent all our time in restoration mode, we would not be creating any outlets for our emotions, and we would burn out.”

But that's not even close to the end of what grieving people face.

“We've also got socioeconomic factors. Does your insurance cover this stuff? If your insurance does cover it, can you find a therapist that has a way of dealing with grief that feels in tune with how you're experiencing it? If you don't have insurance, or your co-pay is high, a lot of people can't afford out-of-pocket payments to go see a therapist,” Megan Devine said during our conversation. “There can be a lot of pressure from friends and family that say you shouldn't really need help, or that you should go get help — pressure from either direction. And managing all of those opinions, both internal and external, around whether you should get help, and what that kind of help should look like, all of that influx can just result in decision fatigue.”

While there is a lot pitted against people who are hurting and longing for some sort of connection, online support groups are helping them push through those seemingly immovable barriers to true healing.

The end goal is community

“Grief can be really isolating and incredibly lonely,” Devine said as we concluded our discussion. "Even when your friends and family want to be supportive, they're not you. They have their own lives to go back to. In these communities, everybody is living through a different death, but we're all united in the fact that this sucks, and it's hard, and it's lonely.”

It’s true, the internet can often be a cacophony of hatred and toxicity, but sometimes you find a small pocket of empathy and humanity. It’s happening every day in online grief support groups like the ones on Reddit.

I see myself holding on to these groups for the foreseeable future. Grief is a cycle, one that I may very well be doomed to be a part of forever. It's been more than two years since I lost my dad, and I still have bouts of intense sadness over it,  but talking to people who know exactly what I’m feeling has taken me from having no hope to officially being on the mend. I’ve become more comfortable in my grief, my dysfunction, from watching these impossibly strong human beings lift one another up, giving each other permission to be sad, happy, and everything in between together. Grief is not a one-size-fits-all kind of thing, but online, we somehow all feel equal.

And, as I started to feel like I had a community of other grieving people on my side, I finally built up the courage to leave that job that I hated. I started to take care of myself again. I started to pursue writing. I was able to enjoy happy moments, even when they were a rarity. I felt like I was a real person, living a real life again.

I’d be lying to you if I said that I was totally better. I still have work to do, and I’m trying to remain undaunted in my progress. Although I’ve been feeling OK lately, there are still days where I break down from missing my dad. I often think about all the moments in my life he’s not going to be there for — my wedding, the birth of my children. I’ll carry this loss for life, but I’ll also carry his memory.

If you’re like me, just know that all is not lost. You might also be able to find a home on the internet if you look hard enough. If not, you’re always welcome to come join me and my new friends. We'll be there for you. We've been where you are, too.