People who visit these pages regularly know that I'm a fan of social media. The editor once put the headline on a piece I'd written 'I'm Alan and I'm a tweetaholic'. I enjoy the engagement, the speed and the versatility of social media. Twitter is now as important a news source as the news agencies, many of whom put breaking news there anyway.
People live their lives on social media. I am about to defriend a number of people who constantly post pictures of their food. I've seen pictures from weddings I've missed, been swept up in the excitement of new babies from afar and shared in the joys of promotion or graduation. Those who believe that social media leads to oversharing may be right. Not everything needs to be put online, all boundaries have not been removed.
However, I stumbled across some tweets from a journalist which stopped me in my tracks. This wasn't an unusual news story or an insightful piece of analysis. National Public Radio's Scott Simon was by his mother's bedside. And she was dying. 'I don't know how we'll get through these next few days. And, I don't want them to end.'
It wasn't a moment by moment thing. These were updates in the stolen time of terrible waiting. Perhaps it was to create a record he could remember and read later to share his obvious love for his mother, but he took time to live her final hours in public, across the world and across the web. 'I love holding my mother's hand. Haven't held it like this since I was 9. Why did I stop? I thought it unmanly? What crap.'
I wasn't the only one who started to follow. Those signed up to watch his feed grew day after day. 'Wish clever minds that invented the Space Shuttle or Roomba could devise an oxygen mask that doesn't slip every 20 minutes.' It brought a smile to my face – and I'm sure to many others. But then we were reminded of the poignancy of the moment, of the love and the bond, of the strength a parent, even a dying one, can give. 'In the middle of nights like this, my knees shake as if there's an earthquake. I hold my mother's arm for strength – still.'
He created a community which was reminded through his tweets of what it was like to feel, to wait and to know how it will end but not when. He braced himself for the final moments writing: 'I know end might be near as this is only day of my adulthood I've seen my mother and she hasn't asked, "Why that shirt?"'
There are those who felt it was wrong. They said he was exploiting his mother, that death was private, that those who followed were 'vacuous weirdos' and trying to sum up a life in 140 characters was 'demeaning'. Yet it felt like those people hadn't read his feed. 'I just realised: she once had to let me go into the big wide world. Now I have to let her go the same way.' Others were grateful for his openness, finding comfort for this loss and hope that their loved ones may pass as peacefully.
Scott Simon's mother died last Monday evening. 'The heavens over Chicago have opened and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped onstage.' Scott Simon wrote not for others but for himself. In a way he knew how, he paid tribute to a life well lived, to a mother he loved and would miss. As it played out on social media, others would have questioned their attitudes to death, the idea of how to mourn or pay tribute. It may even have made them hug their mothers a little bit more tightly.
It was raw, and it was honest. It was compelling and moving. It turned pain into poetry.
Alan Fisher is an Al Jazeera senior correspondent