(So many content warnings, y’all. Don’t click the links if you don’t want to see the images. I linked them in order to cite some sources.)

Many of us know what it is to lose someone. We may journey through the land of grief on different paths, facing different monsters, but everyone who lives long enough goes through it. You’d think it could make people more empathetic, and sometimes it does. Sometimes, however, it seems to turn people into monsters themselves. But that’s not what I want to write about today.

Today, I’m thinking about the people whose loss becomes public, becomes spectacle, becomes meme-ified, weaponized, or dissected.

In 1947, LIFE Magazine published a photo of the body of a young woman who had leapt to her death from the Empire State Building. She’s been called “the most beautiful suicide.” Imagine being her family, friends, or her fiancé?

Think of everyone traumatized by September 11, 2001 seeing the image of the falling man. Even if it wasn’t your loved one, you might know your loved one faced a similar death. And maybe you knew no one in New York City, but the image haunted you because you’re human and such a sight is terrifying and you’re empathetic. But also plenty of people were upset the photo was taken and published for the world to see. They said the photo was exploitative and wrong.

You can debate, of course, the ethics of photojournalism, but now everyone has a camera, and so if something terrible is happening, someone–not a photojournalist–is filming it. I imagine that even things happening behind the walls of detention centers where abuses and murders are happening, someone is still photographing at least some of them. People did, after all, photograph torture in Abu Ghraib prison and lynchings throughout the United States. (In case you never learned this horrifying fact, white people would lynch someone Black or brown and take pictures in order to make postcards. Postcards. This is not the action of people afraid the truth will come out. These are people who know they don’t need to care.) The whys and wherefores of it all are a necessary discussion, but today, I’m thinking about the loved ones of the victims in the photos. What is it like to be scrolling on social media, and suddenly, someone has shared an image that goes straight to your heart because its your child, parent, sibling, friend.

I don’t mean to suggest the families don’t want the pictures. Emmett Till’s mother certainly did. Well, she wanted an open casket for her murdered child so that people would see and bear witness.

Witness.

I’m thinking, as you may have guessed, of the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. What must it be like for their families to see those videos. They’re everywhere. Slowed down. Labeled. Analyzed. Argued over. Lied about.

I’m thinking of the family of Tamir Rice. That was filmed. And there was no justice whatsoever. Tamir was 12. There’s video of Philando Castile. No justice there either.

Photographs and video don’t automatically bring justice. No shit. It can’t. At least not in our here and now with our denial, biases, fascism, and deep fakes.

But again, in this moment, I’m thinking about the families. They can see their loved one harmed and hear people lie about it. They can replay the video again and again. They can, years down the road, be scrolling on social media, thinking about the most light-hearted of things, and then bam. There it is. The pictures. The clip. The comments.

I don’t know how each person involved processes that. It’s a personal journey on a road you don’t know until you’re on it.

May it be a road you never see.

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There’s so many other instances I could write about and aspects of all this to discuss. This is only a fraction.

Thanks for reading.