Please Confirm You’d Like To Opt Out Of Grief

Why the opt-out email is worse than the one it’s trying to spare you from

There’s an email sitting in your inbox. It arrived on a Tuesday, which feels fitting somehow — not even the dignity of a Monday or a Friday, just a Tuesday — and the subject line reads:

“We know Mother’s Day can be difficult. Click here to opt out of our upcoming emails.”

How thoughtful. How progressive. How utterly, spectacularly useless.

Because here’s the thing nobody at the marketing meeting considered: the person reading this email has now read the words “Mother’s Day.” On a Tuesday. Weeks before the actual day. When they were just trying to find out if their parcel had been dispatched.

Thanks for that. Truly.

I work with grief every day. I sit with people who are navigating loss — the newly bereaved, the quietly devastated, the ones who are holding it together in public and completely falling apart at home. I help them find words for the worst moments of their lives. I lost my own dad, so I’m not standing outside looking in.

I know what these days — Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day — can do to someone. Not in a theoretical way. In a “I’ve sat in a room with someone who is absolutely dreading the third Sunday in June” kind of way. In a 'I've been the person who is absolutely dreading the third Sunday in June' kind of way.

Which is precisely why I need to tell you: the opt-out email is making it worse.

The original promotional email — 20% off bouquets! Treat your mum! — people can scroll past that. It’s wallpaper. It’s noise. It lives in the same mental category as emails about car insurance and gym memberships. Grief has enough to contend with without adding “actually read and processed” to the list. The promotional email doesn’t demand anything of you. You don’t have to engage with it. You can keep moving.

But the opt-out email makes you participate.

It hunts you down specifically — it finds the people most likely to be hurting and says: we know you’re one of the sad ones. Are you? Confirm below. Suddenly you’re not scrolling past anything. You’re sitting with the word “difficult.” You’re being asked to formally register your loss with a retail database. To click a button that translates, roughly, as: yes, please note, my father is dead, kindly update your records.

It’s grief as admin. It’s bereavement with a two-step verification process.

And then there’s the timing. Oh, the timing.

The whole architecture of the opt-out system means that instead of one hard day — one Sunday in May where you know it’s coming, you brace for it, and you get through it — you now get an experience. A journey, if you will. You get the opt-out email. Then possibly a second one, because you didn’t click fast enough. Then the day itself. Then, if you’re really lucky, a follow-up asking how your Mother’s Day was and whether you’d like to leave a review.

They have taken one painful day and turned it into a whole season. A subscription to sadness. And nobody signed up.

In my work, we talk about grief ambushes — those moments when loss catches you off guard. A song. A smell. A handwriting that looks familiar on an envelope. The ambush is painful, but it’s part of how grief moves. What the opt-out email has done is industrialise the ambush. Scheduled it. Put it in your calendar six weeks early with a little flower emoji.

I want to be fair. I know what these emails are trying to do. Someone in a boardroom — probably a genuinely decent person — said “we should be more sensitive” and everyone nodded and felt good about themselves and went to lunch. The intention is kind. I’m not disputing the intention.

But there is something revealing about the solution they landed on. The opt-out email doesn’t make the problem go away. You still get the email. You still open it. You still read it. You’ve just been given the option to not receive further emails about a holiday that the entire world will still be celebrating loudly around you, regardless of what you clicked on a Tuesday in March.

It’s the retail equivalent of someone asking “are you okay?” in a tone that makes very clear they are hoping you’ll say yes.

Valentine’s Day now has its own opt-out too, as it happens. Which sounds like progress. And I suppose it is, in the same way that being handed an umbrella after you’re already soaked is technically progress.

Because Valentine’s Day has opened up a whole new frontier of pain that the opt-out system is simply not equipped to handle. Losing a partner — whether to death or to the end of a relationship — is a completely different kind of February. And those two things are not the same. Not remotely. “My person died” and “My person left” sit in entirely different rooms of grief, and both of them are poorly served by a cheerful email asking them to click a heart to confirm their loss.

And then there's Christmas.

I'll wait while you check your inbox for the opt-out email. The one that says "we know this time of year can be difficult" before six weeks of relentless festive content. The one with the little button that lets you formally register that this year, for whatever reason, Christmas is going to be hard.

Still waiting.

It doesn't exist. In all the collective hand-wringing about sensitivity and difficult days, nobody has got around to Christmas. Which is interesting, because Christmas is the longest, loudest, most inescapable difficult day of them all. It doesn't last twenty-four hours — it lasts from the first John Lewis advert in October until the decorations come down in January. It is everywhere, all at once, for months. And the grief that arrives with it — the first Christmas without someone, the empty chair at the table, the traditions that suddenly have nobody to do them with — is some of the most acute there is.

But there's no opt-out for Christmas. Because Christmas isn't positioned as a day for a specific relationship. It's universal joy. Everyone's included, whether they like it or not. And so the opt-out system, in its very selective sensitivity, will protect you from Mother's Day and Father's Day and now apparently Valentine's Day — the niche griefs, the categorisable ones — but the big one? The loud one? The one that starts in October and doesn't stop?

You're on your own. We'll see you on the other side. Here's a discount code.

This is the thing about grief that no email system can account for: it doesn’t work like a mailing list. You can’t unsubscribe. There is no preference centre. You don’t get to select which days hurt and opt out of the rest. Grief shows up uninvited, on its own schedule, and it does not care about your inbox management.

I’ve sat with enough people to know that what they need in those hard weeks before a difficult day isn’t an email asking them to confirm their pain. What they need is acknowledgement that doesn’t require anything from them. Permission to feel what they feel without having to click anything.

So I’ll make one small request on behalf of every person who opens their inbox on a Tuesday and gets ambushed by a little flower and a cheerful font:

If you’re going to send the opt-out email, — if you’re going to find people in their grief and ask them to confirm it — at least don’t make it cheerful. Don’t put a flower in the corner. Don’t sign it off with love from the team. Send one, once a year saying - would you like to opt out of any/all of these holidays.

Say we know. We’re sorry. Here’s the link.