I was standing outside my high school waiting to get picked up when I opened Instagram and saw the news, I thought it was a joke. Genuinely. Cut to me looking at @harryflorals on Instagram and all of my other fan accounts I follow to see if it was true. It was. My heart immediately felt heavier than it had in years. I am still filled with grief and shock. I feel for his son, Bear, who woke up without a father. I feel for his entire family, who is feeling one of the most complex, nuanced, and heavy feelings someone can experience: grief. I can’t imagine how the other boys are feeling. Grieving someone you have lost contact with or have bad memories with is so, so so hard and I know that feeling personally. Grief is devastating, it is confusing, it is paralyzing, it is all-consuming. When you’re a kid, in your mind the people you admire or look up to are immortal. They’re on a pedestal and therefore they cannot die. Especially if they are someone who, from a young age, was commodified and molded to be an object you could sell. It is shocking to be so abruptly brought out of that fantasy. I imagined being 50, having my children or my wife say “Did you hear (insert member here) died?”. I never expected to have to deal with this kind of grief until very later in life. I never thought I would be 17, scrolling through Tumblr and Instagram, trying to make sense of one of them dying so, so, so devastatingly young.
My second-grade teacher got me into One Direction, and over that year, I became a massive fan. I brought the boys up in every conversation—anyone who knew me back then can attest to that—and made them my whole personality. Sometime during the end of the second grade, they announced that they would be going on hiatus. I remember feeling numb and in shock, I had just gotten into them. When their History music video came out, my second-grade teacher, whom I still talk to, promised to premiere it on her projector at the end of class. I remember sobbing, my best friend at the time and I were holding each other. I was mourning, and grieving, and processing. That was a big thing for an 8-year-old to go through. What other loss does she know?
While having a family member be sick at home and eventually passing in the sixth grade, I regressed to my 8 year old self. I made One Direction my entire personality again. I lost friends because they “just didn’t understand it” (aka: they were sick of hearing me only talk about them). I would listen to One Direction all day at school, and read fanfiction on the school bus and before I fell asleep. I would watch any media I could get my hands on that involved them. They were my support, and my rock to fall back on during that hardship. After this family member passed away in March of 2020, just a week before lockdown happened, One Direction became even more of a support. I felt isolated and lonely but the online community and the fandom helped me feel like I had a place, and I know I’ll always be thankful for that of course. As I healed and found other coping mechanisms, I still kept them incredibly dear to my heart, leaning on them whenever I needed to.
Once the news broke about Liam's passing and everything that followed, it felt like everyone was coming together to mourn. People who have been active consistently for years, people who have been a bit more inactive (like me), and even people who got a platform from this community (Sarah Baska, Brittany Broski, etc). The community is the strongest it has been in awhile right now. We are all going through something so linear, and so complicated. We didn’t know him, but he was a part of all of our childhoods. I still have all of my old merch I’ve collected over the years. I look to my right and I see the throw pillow and body pillow that are tucked underneath my bed. I see my One Direction stuffed bear and my poster and the old, untouched electric toothbrush I thrifted when I was 12. I may not as big of a fan actively as I once was, but this grief still runs deep. He was infinitely too young and it hurts to think that he felt that way to do something like that.
To everyone who is also feeling this grief, I see you. You are not being dramatic. Your grief and mourning are completely valid.
