Targeted advertising is one of the things that makes the internet go ’round. It’s one of the main reasons why site like Facebook are free. They’ve always been annoying and sometimes creepy, like when an ad pops up about something that you swear you only ever spoke in person to someone about.
Once I became a bereaved parent, ads were one of those things that immediately compounded my grief. At first, it was due to the fact that I was receiving regular ads relating to babies and being a parent, since we’d been in happy planning mode to get ready to have a tiny helpless human join our family in another 20 weeks. As someone whose stillborn child’s ashes were (and still are) sitting in a small urn on my side table, these ads were jarring and unwelcome, little knife jabs into my heart. What was worse were ads for the website where I ordered the urn from, or the occasional ad specifically about pregnancy/infant loss. I figured out a way to tell facebook to avoid pregnancy and child related ads – it reduced the number but didn’t make them go away completely.
Then Sara died and I suddenly had a new hat to put on – that of a widowed person, a man grieving his wife. The targeted ads didn’t take long to follow suit. The worst one was this god-awful t-shirt ad with this male model wearing a shirt that had a message on it about how he had the best wife ever, who was in heaven because heaven needed her more… or something like that. It was horrible. I understand some people find comfort in thoughts of their loved ones being taken by God for a higher purpose, but that doesn’t work for me, and the t-shirt ad made me physically recoil.
The widower t-shirt ad also made me really disgruntled that attached to my online presence is now the label of widower. I had no choice in any of this. It’s not like my carefully crafted online profile where I choose what picture I want to display, what I want to post, who I’m friends with… It’s not a website I voluntarily signed up for or a list I added my email to. It’s not a new hobby or club or interest that I wouldn’t mind seeing ads about. My life went off the rails last year, and through no fault of anyone’s, I lost my family. The powers that be in the internet see that as nothing but another datapoint, another token of information they can use to get money out of me. They’re trying to monetize my grief, and I hate it. I don’t want random people trying to make money off of me because I went through the worst year of my life last year.
I know some might dismiss this as silly or petty or something I should be able to just ignore, but it really is death by a thousand papercuts. It’s the targeted ads, it’s the constant sadness, being isolated at home alone, it’s the people who think the economy is more important than the lives of anyone like Sara, who if she were alive would be in danger of dying if she caught the virus. It’s the people who think that everyone should just be able to get over pregnancy loss or who think there should be a tidy timeline on grief. It’s hearing about fellow grievers who are told that their person wouldn’t have died if they had just prayed more and had more faith. It’s watching my dog fight his fourth bout of pneumonia while I wonder if I’ll have yet another loss added on to the pile in the near future. It’s seeing people’s lives moving on while I’m just floating here, still trying to understand what the hell happened.
If I want to purchase anything relating to my status as a widow, I’ll seek it out and buy it… but in the meantime, I really wish I could tell the advertisers to leave my grief alone.
