My Hair Looks Amazing, Also Grandma Is Dead

Around 2013 a Tumblr called Selfies at Funerals started collecting exactly what the name promised: teenagers photographing themselves at memorial services, captioning the images with thoughts like cried all my makeup off, we’re those weird people who take selfies at funerals, or—my personal favorite—my hair looks so good today. Grinning into phone cameras while the casket sits ten feet behind them.

The outrage machine ran with it, obviously. Another data point in the generational-decline narrative. Kids these days, etc. But I find myself less disgusted than genuinely curious about the psychology. Grief is unbearable and adolescents have even fewer tools for it than adults do. The phone is the most familiar object in their world. Taking a selfie might be the only emotional language some of them have—a way of saying: I was here, this happened, I survived this moment. That it looks grotesque from the outside doesn’t mean the internal logic is entirely absent.

Or maybe some of them are just self-absorbed little shits. Both things can be true.

What actually unsettles me isn’t the selfies themselves but the captioning—the drive to narrate the experience for an audience in real time. The funeral stops being a private ritual and becomes content. The grief becomes a backdrop. That’s not entirely new behavior—people have always turned mourning into spectacle, from Victorian death photography to elaborate New Orleans jazz funerals—but the speed and casualness of it, the my hair looks so good today energy, is something different. Something that still doesn’t quite have a name.