‘TikTok is what helped me stay alive’: How the social platform is helping a new generation cope with death
- Young people share deeply personal and vulnerable moments of heartbreak in TikTok’s short-form videos.
- Sharing creates a sense of community and eases loneliness, grief experts say.
- With hashtags like #grieftok, raw sorrow mingles with celebrations of life.
Midori Anderson and Orlando Foreman met on Tinder in the summer of 2019 when they were students at the University of Arkansas. That November, he brought her flowers and tried to spell out “will you be my girlfriend?” in rose petals on her bed but ran out of space. She keeps the card he gave her in her wallet: “I did not want to eat your mom’s greens without us being official.”