In a WhatsApp group for orphans, a group of strangers helped me finally understand my grief

It’s New Year’s Eve 2019 and I'm going nowhere. Instead, I’m curled up on the sofa, smiling at my phone.

I’m reading through a Whatsapp group chat that was set up a few weeks before. Everyone in the chat is a stranger to each other, but we all share a significant life experience: grief. The group is called “Young Orphans.”

Tonight, we’re talking about sex: more specifically, the effect that grieving has on the sex drive. The general consensus is that grief can provoke an urge to create life in its early to mid-stages—but then there’s a long, slow drop-off in libido as the sorrow continues. There are a lot of jokes about how this knowledge might’ve changed our early perceptions of grief. Those of us who lost parents in our teenage years reflect on how little we understood about ourselves back then.

I lost my parents as a teenager, in 2000 and 2003, just before the internet became such an essential part of our everyday lives. Grief by its nature is an isolating experience, but without the means to search for other people in my situation, I can now see how incredibly lonely an experience it was for me. The enormity of my loss scared people who hadn’t yet faced grief—not just my 19-year-old friends and peers, but older adults, too.

It’s not an experience I would wish on anyone. Sadly, though, for some in the group, it’s searingly new, and they’re continually discovering grief’s landmines.

Katharine Horgan set up the group on 9th December 2019. A charity worker, she was moved to create the “Young Orphans” in a personal capacity in response to a message retweeted by the popular podcast Griefcast. The tweet asked how people without parents faced the Christmas holidays. As Horgan says, they were asking if there were resources for “young orphans’ who aren't children.” She saw lots of responses saying “‘no, but I wish there was!’”

“I finally thought ‘I wish there was too—let’s do this.’” She put a screenshot of the chat—illustrated by a red-haired, freckled orphan, Annie—on her Twitter feed, and invited strangers into her DMs.

That’s a story that could only have happened once the internet had matured: a podcast’s Twitter account leading strangers into sharing some of their most painful moments over text. (Horgan says she chose Whatsapp for “ease—I'm familiar with it. Most people have it. First idea that popped into my head.”) There are currently 52 members in the group, with the majority of members in the UK and US, but also a number from Europe. Plans are afoot for drinks in London when various people visit in the next few months.

The group chat is there for us to shed the need to manage other people’s reactions to our pain, which they can’t imagine. We’re free to tell the truth, no matter how bleak—at least among others who have known grief, there will be understanding. “It's a very lonely feeling to be parentless in the world, especially when you're a lot younger than people would expect an orphan to be,” says a London-based member of the chat, freelance journalist Holly Brockwell. “It's wonderful having a group of people who completely get it, and we share our upsides, downsides, and advice every day.”

Brockwell has hit upon the great advantage of having this group therapy—because surely that’s what this is—hosted on Whatsapp. Grief ebbs and flows, causing mood swings and pushing unwelcome thoughts upon the sufferer. There’s an unspoken sense of responsibility to each other, and a level of anonymity if needed. Having a group chat on the smartphone that’s always with us to dive into at any moment is like having a life vest to hand in a sea that can turn grey and choppy at any point. We can expect responses in real-time: our mayday calls are answered quickly, which isn’t always the case on other platforms. Equally, the notifications can be switched off, and the chat ignored for a while.

Recently, we got into a conversation about the sheer embarrassment of not having parents at our graduations. I ended up sharing a photo from my MA ceremony in 2012, where I’m stood between my brother and his girlfriend at the time, now my sister-in-law. A sweet family photo. The compliments on the picture were lovely, but, more importantly, they jolted me into realising that we, the parentless, often don’t have many people in our lives to celebrate our achievements. That picture isn’t framed and displayed proudly in my childhood home because my parents simply aren’t there anymore: in 2012, now, or ever again.

“Being orphaned as a young adult is a deeply life-changing experience that nothing can prepare you for,” says group member Frances Everard, a New York-based lawyer originally from New Zealand. “The grief is also cumulative. I didn’t just grieve the huge loss of the two most important people in my life, I also grieved for the loss of my childhood and youth, and I grieved for all the future moments they’d miss out on.”

There’s a part of me that will always continue to want the life we should’ve had as a family. One of the secondary losses of grief is the pain of never getting to have your loved one again in your life, which is distinct from the hurt of experiencing their death. Until I read the responses to my graduation photo, I wasn't quite able to put into words what I had been missing all these years. How grateful I am to find it in the kindness of strangers, brought together by a messaging app.

If you’d like to join the Young Orphans Whatsapp group, you can find the details in Katharine Horgan’s pinned tweet