Editorial: How Virgin Islanders Process Grief and Loss in a Changing World
Grieving online can be challenging. As you read these words, forests are burning, children are dying from famine, and climate collapse will disrupt our lives if humans fail to act. It's a lot.
Despite the ubiquity of cell phones and the internet, consider this for a moment: There are Virgin Islanders who have never been online.
As of April 2024, there were over 5 billion internet users worldwide, or 67 percent of the global population. According to Pew Research Center, eight-in-ten U.S. adults say they subscribe to a broadband internet service at home.
For decades, the people of the U.S. Virgin Islands have lost friends and family to gun violence. With years gone and an ongoing renaissance in tech, the physical and digital spaces people used to grieve and mourn have changed.
Some Virgin Islanders grieve in solitude, some grieve within their communities, some observe communities grieving online, and some grieve in completely separate ecosystems.
The Internet
It only fits that telephone and internet access are lumped into one category. Both technologies are largely inseparable (the smartphone and the modern internet), and together, they’ve connected different cultures and even birthed and killed entire industries.
Grieving online can be challenging. As you read these words, forests are burning, children are dying from famine, and climate collapse will disrupt our lives if humans fail to act. It’s a lot to take in all at once. However, 100 years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible to absorb this many traumatic events and global downturns at such a rapid pace.
In many ways, Virgin Islanders who regularly grieve while processing the events on social media are grieving in the fast lane. Truthfully, the success of the internet removed the territory’s drive to invest in a reliable public transit system.
Public Transportation & Public Spaces
With the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic behind us, everything about how Virgin Islanders commute around the island, exchange hellos, and purchase goods has changed.
As the pandemic raged in 2020 and customers strolled into the Sugar Estate Post Office on St. Thomas, an elderly man explained, “Man, the post office ain’t what it used to be!”
He wasn’t complaining about the service or a lost package. He was talking about the silence gripping the Post Office’s waiting area. The room, normally filled with hellos and smiles, was now packed with masks, unknown faces, and tight lips.
Public transportation and visits to the market allowed residents to share information and updates, including updates about government policies and the death of loved ones. Even today, people who don’t have access to an internet connection continue to share deaths and births through word of mouth. Those conversations happen in shopping centers, Post Office lines, buses, and in passing.
The people of the Virgin Islands have endured periods where the territory’s fleet of VITRAN buses shrunk and closed routes that have been offline for decades. Visualizing each island’s (historical) transportation system as a social network makes it easy to see how a degraded transportation model could disrupt social bonds over decades.
Radio
For people who grew up in the Caribbean before 2010, the sounds of radio static in the morning are likely seared into your memory. Radio continues to connect communities after severe weather events, and politicians still use it to win regional elections.
Radio was the low-cost way to learn about emergency road closures, school closures, inclement weather, or funeral arrangements for someone you knew.
Print Media
Print media is not finished with the 21st century. The New York Times, the most successful print paper in the world, has one of the industry’s most impressive digital distribution models.
Today, some residents rely on the obituary page in the Virgin Islands Daily News and a combination of radio and telephone for information about deaths.
With so many mediums to absorb information, the territory’s rituals for observing death and loss are everchanging.
With the internet, radio, and print media keeping humans connected, I don’t lose sight of how the rapid expansion of the internet has broken the Caribbean’s transportation model and accelerated the grief communities feel after massive losses.
Our communities are incredibly fragmented, and while that might be okay, it’s also our greatest weakness in times of crisis and social unrest.