Why Grief Feels So Lonely—And Why the Data Proves We Aren’t

It’s Mother’s Day this weekend in the US and I wrote a piece for Literary Hub exploring what turns out to be one of the most profoundly isolating experiences we go through as humans: grief.

What We Ask Google is personal to me. Six months before writing the book, our mum, Janet, died. In the wake of her passing, I found myself flooded with endless, desperate questions: Why did this happen? Why do I feel this way? How long will this last?

Mum was an artist and she is probably the reason why my brother and I think of the world in such visual ways. The hole she left in our lives will be familiar to anyone reading this who has lost someone. The chapter on grief was the first one I wrote for the book – largely because I knew it would be the hardest to do.

When you’re grieving, it feels like you are patient zero. The pain is so raw and incomprehensible that you assume no one else could possibly understand it. I have spent the last decade looking at the world’s largest publicly available dataset, and I can tell you that the data paints a very different, surprisingly hopeful picture.

When we look at the billions of anonymous searches we make every day, we see that none of us are truly alone in our emotions. Read more on LitHub.

“The Data Shows We’re Never Truly Alone.” What Our Online Searches Say About Loss