‘She was my world. I loved her with my heart and soul’: my glimpse into a stranger’s grief

I can't stop thinking about the woman who tweeted about her mother's death - and the comfort it brought her

Last month, a woman shared the following with me: My mum took a Covid test yesterday. It was positive. She died this afternoon. I can't say that Covid was the cause of her death. She was my world. I loved her with my heart and soul. I am in pieces. My heart and my world are shattered. How do I go on without her?" Appalling, obviously, but the thing is, I don't know this woman at all. Her howl of pain came my way in the form of a tweet, presumably having been liked or retweeted by someone I follow. Two weeks later, her suffering is still on my mind.

Yet when I first saw the tweet I winced. Why? Well, I suppose I felt this was oversharing. But being something of an oversharer myself, in these pages and elsewhere, this is hypocrisy on my part. I also might have suspected - how dare I? - that she was baring her soul on Twitter only because she didn't have any real friends to talk to, poor woman. And it felt intrusive, even voyeuristic, to be privy to this stranger's suffering. What business of mine is her grief? But equally, what business of mine is it to have a view on how she expresses it and to whom?

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist