As radio host Scott Simon put it, "the heavens over Chicago have opened up and Patricia Lyons Simon Newman has stepped on stage."
For the past two weeks, Simon, of NPR's "Saturday Weekend Edition," has been tweeting about the looming death of his 84-year-old mother, sharing it with his 1.2 million followers. She died Monday.
Since July 16, when he learned about her emergency surgery, through the ICU to the "Heart rate dropping. Heart dropping" moment, as he tweets, the world had a 140-character view of life's final journey.
Ethicists have taken note.
"This is the tip of a very big iceberg shift in thinking about privacy and intimate moments, when someone that prominent does that," said Art Caplan, director of medical ethics at NYU Langone Medical Center.
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"It's not that he should or shouldn't do it; that's for him to decide and discuss with his mom and other relatives," he said. "But it's clear to me that one of the last places -- sex, birthing and dying -- are not off limits anymore. There aren't many spheres left, and that's a really notable shift."
Simon, 61, described holding his mother's hand: "Haven't held it like this since I was 9." And shares her pain: "Will this go on forever?"
He jokes about her joy over flossing her teeth and tears up when his mother reacts to the birth of the royal baby.
Sharon Stone on Aging: Imperfections Are Sexy Watch VideoAnd one of the last goodbyes: "Mother cries Help Me at 2:30. Been holding her like a baby since. She's asleep now. All I can do is hold on to her."
He tweeted wryly Tuesday about being at the cemetery: "Almost interred next to total stranger. Why not make new friends?"
"Worst: telling our daughters," he tweets. "Oldest was flinty, youngest sobbed."
Simon himself broke into tears when he was interviewed on NPR Tuesday.
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Meanwhile, Simon's heartfelt messages have gone viral, encouraging strangers to respond and share in his grief.
One follower, Steve McLaughlin, tweeted, "I haven't held my mother's hand in a long time, thank you for reminding me that time is fleeting and that I need to do that."
Other public figures have shared similar moments, but not in real time on the Internet. In 2004, the photographer Annie Leibovitz documented the death of her partner, writer Susan Sontag. Her son later called the photos, "carnival images of celebrity death."
"Social media has changed the way many people do lots of things," said Dr. Stuart Youngner, the Bioethics Department chairman at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland. "Why not grieving? Scott Simon is a public figure and may well find that pubic expression of what many consider private feelings is helpful to him."
"After all," he adds. "Eric Clapton wrote a song about his young son who fell and died from an open window."
Philadelphia psychologist Ann Rosen Spector agrees that social media are "just a fact of life now."
But when it comes to grieving, sharing can be helpful, "as long as people don't feel pressured into doing it," she said. "Some people share every time they buy a new pair of shoes or sneeze or cough. Some people share medical updates. It's a whole new world. There is not a standard of care to grieve."
Kenneth Doka, a senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America and author of "Beyond Kubler-Ross: New Perspectives on Death, Dying and Grief," calls the support system that Twitter created around Simon "an incredible phenomenon."
But he said he was "curious" why Simon's mother was in so much pain, given scientific and medical advances in hospice care. "I wondered if we did all we could for this woman in pain," said Doka, who's also a professor of gerontology at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle in New York.
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