A syndicated advice columnist is telling Americans they have no business judging how someone announces a death — inserting the press into the most personal moment a family faces, and deciding which reactions are permissible and which aren't.

The column, running in both the Anchorage Daily News and The Denver Post, features a reader who called it "tacky" when a Facebook friend posted about her husband's death and invited people to request her mailing address if they wanted to send something. The columnist, "Eric," shot back hard: "If by 'tacky' you mean good and thoughtful communication, then sure." He argued the widow was simply removing barriers for people who might feel uncomfortable asking for her address during a painful time. And then came the kicker: "This doesn't strike me as a solicitation of condolences, but even if it was, what of it?"

The Anchorage Daily News framed the column as a call for tolerance — "Let's not police how people announce a loved one's death." The Denver Post went with the buzzier angle, headlining the "tacky" Facebook announcement. Same column, same words, different pitch to the reader. Neither outlet paused to ask why a newspaper columnist is arbitrating mourning etiquette in the first place.

Here's what's actually at stake. For generations, Americans handled death through their churches, their funeral homes, their extended families — institutions with roots in the community and rituals honed over centuries. The obituary in the local paper served a practical function: it informed. The church ladies brought casseroles. You didn't need a columnist's permission slip to have an opinion about what was dignified and what wasn't, because the community itself enforced its own norms — norms that grew out of shared faith and shared experience, not out of a media brand's sense of what's "thoughtful."

Now death announcements live on Facebook, and a syndicated columnist is positioned as the referee of appropriate feeling. The widow in question may well have been practical and considerate. She may also have violated norms that existed for good reasons — norms about privacy, about not burdening the bereaved with logistics, about the difference between a death notice and a gift solicitation. Reasonable people can disagree. What's not reasonable is a media figure declaring one side of that disagreement off-limits.

The column also addresses a second letter — a 74-year-old widow spending $2,000 per visit to see grandchildren while her daughter-in-law makes her unwelcome. Eric's advice: talk to your son, but it's fine to stop visiting. A grandmother priced out of seeing her own grandchildren, and the best institutional media can offer is "take a little time off." No acknowledgment that something fundamental has broken in family life when a mother has to rent an Airbnb to visit her son's home.

The old rituals around death and family weren't perfect. But they were ours. They belonged to communities, not to columnists. Every time the press steps in to tell you what you're allowed to think about how people grieve, or how families should handle estrangement, it's replacing something that didn't need replacing — and collecting the authority for itself.

The question isn't whether that widow's Facebook post was tacky. The question is who died and made the advice columnists the bishops of American mourning.