Digital Mourning

A Reflection

I still grieve - about many things - Hemanshu’s passing remains one of them. It was Hemanshu’s birthday on 21 March, he would’ve turned 22. I listened to Ye’s new studio album titled BULLY today.

The following essay has been sitting in my drafts for a while. I don’t know if there exists a right time to share this, regardless here it goes ;

Lately, any app I open, be it my gallery or my email or my calendar, I am reminded of the digital residues of my friend who passed away recently - liked messages, photographs, screenshots, screenshots and emails. What is left in this world post-death are not just physical belongings but digital selves.

Digital selves do not just transcend traditional notions of letting go or moving on but enable new ways of grieving. After my friend Dhruv passed, I kept messaging his account for a while - naively attempting to tell him everything new that was going on. I used the film playlist links he had sent me a long while back. The digital archive of our whatsapp conversation traced the progression of our friendship - like the times when he was running for the student government including a voice note he had sent me - “Atharv bro your pictures are banger today, ten out of ten”.

On 3 January I told Hemanshu that I do not want to lose another friend - he replied “for plot purposes” followed by a “Jk”. Hemanshu passed away two days later - he lived a life of 21 years. I shared a 5 year long friendship with him. While we were from the same town, our friendship was primarily digital - through forwarding of reels, text message and hour-long phone calls. When we were not in touch through direct conversations, a digital language of reel-forwards existed between us.

On 5th January I had sent him around five reels, the most recent forward was sent at 7 PM. An hour later I found out that he had passed away at 11 AM in the morning. I remember making a hopeless phone call to his phone. I remember looking at the ongoing traffic as I got the confirmation of his departure.

For the next several days, using social media while working through the grief was a weird experience. Hemanshu’s account was still at the top of my forwarding list, as it had been for the past several years. I kept going back to our old text messages, I couldn’t help but laugh at the jokes we shared. For a few brief seconds, his social media account still being there in my chat list made me feel like he was still alive, active and about to reply to my message. But it’s just his “virtual self”, one that will remain on the platform and in mysterious data networks till the end of time. What’s so confusing yet intriguing about digital existence is that it never goes away with the person. They always somehow appear online - the reels and posts they liked appear on my feed. Somehow in all our data networks, their information, user input, recorded activities are still flowing - through the cloud, through wires, social media servers. Moreover, their data will still be in transit and usage, possibly their account will be memorialized - turning into a digital memorial.

When I was younger, I would often visit the social media accounts of celebrities and artists who have passed away and take a look at their most recent post - be it Irrfan Khan or Mac Miller, their comment sections are still active, comments pour in every minute “Miss you Irrfan sir” or “Rip Mac 💔”. The language of grief is mostly inconceivable - so when I felt that perhaps crying or talking didn’t do justice to how I was feeling, I turned to social media - expressing grief digitally, or reading old text exchanges. An old classmate recently told me, “why are you reading the old chats, it will only bring you more pain”, but I replied “no pain is worse than him passing, I don’t feel it anymore”.

On 25 January, I went to watch Marty Supreme with a few of my friends, and couldn’t help but remember that Hemanshu wanted to watch Marty Supreme too. A month ago, he had shared a link to the official Marty Supreme jacket with me - that’s how he was, a bit materialistic, but always dreaming above himself, above ourselves.

He once shared a lyric from “Hey Mama” by Kanye West on his Instagram story - money wasn’t about net worth for him, it was about possibilities.

I said, “Mommy I’ma love you ‘til you don’t hurt no more

And when I’m older, you ain’t gotta work no more

And I’ma get you that mansion that we couldn’t afford”

Hemanshu also wanted to watch Marty Supreme, he had told me. At the end of Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet broke down on the screen for the first time in the film, “Everybody Wants To Rule the World” by Tears for Fears played and the movie theatre screen turned dark, I cried for a short while, feeling the pain of this loss, which comes in the form of oceanic waves and then passes by.

In Nov-Dec 2025 he was planning to apply for a writing-based internship. A few days back while clearing up my old files on the laptop, I found a copy of his writing samples and resumes. He would often send me these documents for advice. Hemanshu had developed an interest for writing in his last few months and had opened a Substack page as well. Even though the text block was meant as a response to an internship question that he had sent me to view, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to read it. In casual conversations, he never really expressed how he was feeling without joking about it. For some reason, in that internship application, he was raw and honest with his words :

I hadn’t particularly considered myself writing for my career up until recently. I was trying out different things but I always found something missing, something not clicking and then I realised I wasn’t being honest with myself. I never imagined my empathy and sensitivity to be my core strengths but rather viewed them as my weaknesses. But it isn’t the case anymore which is why I fit in your team. Because [company name] isn’t just about numbers, it is about adding value. I would love to mention that my mother is a primary teacher and I’ve always found it fascinating to interact with children. So full of life. And I can see myself contributing to teach, nurture and inculcate values in children through my writing efforts.

Hemanshu had also made an instagram page to post film edits and creative stuff - called DavinciCurator. The last edit he created and shared was from the film “Meet Joe Black”, the edit says “when death finds you, I hope it finds you alive.” His favorite song was Every Breath You Take, by The Police.

On the day of posting this, last night I found a poem written by Hemanshu about love. He had planned to post it but never did - perhaps I’ll also keep it that way. While travelling in the metro today, I found a collaborative spotify playlist of mine and Hemanshu - it’s titled “Apocalyptic Playlist”.

I’m not sure if I’m the best at opening up, but the digital sphere just helps me be more vulnerable with the world, with my emotions. So after Dhruv passed, I made artworks remembering him, and later a 19-minute-video about how I felt dealing with this immense loss. After I came back from Hemanshu’s funeral, I wrote a long piece about our friendship on Substack - titled “Remembering Hemanshu”. I posted the pictures from his funeral to the song “Kabhi Aah Lab Pe Machal Gayi” by Ghulam Ali. This is an excerpt from the song, along with its translation.

ये तुम्हारे ग़म के चराग़ हैं, कभी बुझ गए कभी जल गए

These are the lamps of your sorrow - they sometimes went out, sometimes ignited.

मैं ग़रीफ़्त-ए-ग़म से न बचा सका, वो हदूद-ए-ग़म से निकल गए

I could not save myself from the clutches of sorrow; they escaped the bounds of grief.

जो फ़ना हुए ग़म-ए-इश्क़ में उन्हें ज़िंदगी का न ग़म हुआ

Those who were annihilated in the grief of love did not grieve for life.

जो न अपनी आग में जल सके वो पराई आग में जल गए

Those who could not burn in their own fire burned in someone else’s.

ये तुम्हारे ग़म के चराग़ हैं, कभी बुझ गए कभी जल गए

These are the lamps of your sorrow - they sometimes went out, sometimes ignited.

All these forms of digital mourning through art and writing allowed me to open up a hybrid space of my own, where grieving does not feel like a burden, where emotions do not feel excessive. This naturally won’t ever bridge the gap left behind by both of my friends, but allowing myself to grieve publicly made me realize that I wasn’t alone. I read moving comments, almost as if my essay has been close-read. Many many messages poured in from strangers, some said they resembled Hemanshu’s interests, some said they felt like they knew him personally, someone told me about their own experience with grief, someone lost their father at a young age, someone lost their grandmother. Loss has been everywhere around us, grief is an organism that lives through us.

And then one day, I watched a clip from a conversation between James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni, Baldwin said, “The one thing you have to do, is try to tell the truth. And what everyone overlooks is that in order to do it, I can only tell you about yourself as much as I can face it about myself. You go through life for a long time. You think that no one has suffered the way I’ve suffered. You know, my god, my god. And then you realize, you read something, you hear something, and you realize that your suffering does not isolate you. That many people have suffered before you, that many people are suffering around. And always will. And all you can do is bring hopefully a little light into that suffering, enough light to the person who is suffering can begin to comprehend his suffering, and begin to live with it and begin to change it, to change his situation. We don’t change anything. All we can do is invest in people with the morale to change it for themselves.”

On the morning of 16 February 2026, I found out that Ye (formerly Kanye West) is performing in New Delhi. It reminded me of 2022-23 when both me and Hemanshu were inspired by his music; sharing edits, songs and exchanging opinions on our favorite songs with him. I felt a very strange unrest within me, seeing that Ye’s concert announcement was out on 16 February, 42 days after Hemanshu passed. We dreamt of many things together. So after the concert announcement dropped in the morning, I couldn’t help but go to our Whatsapp chat - again, an archive of our friendship and searched up “Kanye”, and there it was, he wrote in November 2023 - “I want to listen to Kanye performing Runaway at least once before I die.”

Seeing a notification for his favorite artists’ concert is like receiving a letter that was meant for him - but delivered too late. I feel like we both got so far as friends but now I walk without him. All those dreams - from making a youtube channel in tenth grade to aiming for UPSC or Ivy Leagues after growing up. When I got into Ashoka, we humorously reframed a lyric from the song “I wonder” by Ye which said “My name will help light up the Chicago skyline” to “My name will help light up the Sonipat skyline”. For now, the skyline is dense with fog and smoke.

Could a concert announcement have pushed Hemanshu to stay ? I’m a 100 percent sure he would’ve come to Delhi, we both would have gone to the concert. It is now naive and stupid to think in these lines - I know, and I can’t help it. There are endless possibilities one thinks after losing a loved one. What if I had called him on the night of the fourth ? What if he had gotten into Ashoka a year ago - what if his interview had gone well ? Things would be different.

There are infinite possibilities that one naturally thinks through after losing a loved one to suicide. Every other day I’m reminded of different and new conversations which I felt like I forgot about - five years of friendship, infinite amount of conversations. We were infinite. We dreamt infinitely.

This essay will never be complete, because I will keep finding images, messages - if anything - Instagram archive will itself knock on the door to remind me of some memory of ours from an year back, or four years back. Maybe it matters. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.

How do we hold on to people ? How do we hold onto life in the first place ? I may not be the best person to comprehend that question. I find myself falling back on Baldwin’s words.