What We Talk About When We Talk About Death

Meditations on grief, and gaining membership to The Dead Parent Club

It’s December! Time to look back on the year and recap your highlights—favourite movies, best moments, albums of the year and significant achievements.

Except … it wasn’t one of those years. 2024 will be marked by one event and one event only. It was the year we said goodbye to Mum. When an earth-shattering event like that happens, it carves the timeline in two: once there was before; now we exist in the after. I spent 41 years on this earth with her. If I’m lucky, I’ll have the same amount on the other side of this divide cleaved back in May.

Even if Mum hadn’t died, this year was tough. Barring 2020’s pandemic-led black swan, it’s been the hardest year I’ve spent working as an independent. I’ve dragged myself over the year-end line, grateful for clients, projects and paid subscribers who helped me get where I needed to be—eventually. I only needed to pick up the phone to talk to other friends in adland, or open up in one of many professional Slack communities I’m part of, to realise I wasn’t on my own.

Last week, we crossed six months without her. There isn’t a day that goes past when I don’t deeply miss her—the sound of her voice, her laugh as I told her about the latest grandkid escapade, the way she’d Facetime me in the middle of the day when we both knew she was procrastinating. The first few months, I’d regularly see a story online—about some actor she liked, a book review she’d find interesting, another sorry example of the Tories trampling Britain underfoot—and I’d reach for my phone before realising I’d be sending into the void. She didn’t get to see Rishi and his cronies leave Downing Street. I’m sure she’d have loved it, even if early reviews of the new tenants don’t point towards a blockbuster opening.

Vivid memories return. You cling to them like fragile gemstones, a finite resource. New memories together will arrive no longer; what you’ve got is all you’ve got, so hold on tight. I’ve been coming back to this essay on and off, at the same time as getting Dadurdays off the ground—a powerful reminder that geography was never my strongest topic: in school, at the pub quiz, wherever. Getting Dadurdays off the ground has involved a lot of "Googling names of US cities I only know from TV shows, then figuring out where the fuck they are." I would immediately chuckle and think of Mum, and how great she was with capital cities. It was her Mastermind specialist subject: name a country, she’d instantly come back with the correct capital. All I can offer the kids is a suggestion to ask Google.

Trying not to get all Elliott Smith in here—and because Rob Delaney already did it in A Heart That Works—but everything reminds me of her. Every morning, on the way to the car, I walk past the window of where I sat waiting for her, already sick from what would soon reveal itself as cancer returned. This year, it has felt like every book I read, every movie I watch, contains a key plotline or heart-breaking insight about the loss of a mother. Monkey Man was John Wick told through the colourful lens of a fictional Mumbai city, but instead of the death of a dog, Dev Patel deals with the ongoing trauma of his mother’s death. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On had me reaching for the tissues as it closed with Philip Larkin’s 1974 poem “The Trees:”

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old?
No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Andrew Garfield talked poetically about his mother’s death to both Stephen Colbert and Elmo. Halfway through season three of The Bear (which I loved, I don’t know what you were all complaining about), Marcus opened up to Sydney about joining “the Dead Moms Club.”

“I wish she’d got to try the food,” Marcus laments.

Life is tinged with regret, overloaded with “I wishes” after the death of a loved one. I find myself in the same liminal emotional space. The woman who brought me into the world is no longer in it; the connection broken. The nice thing about your parent dying, if such a thing could exist, is that it inducts you into a club that we all will—with great fear and hope—one day become a part of: the dead parent club. It’s the Hotel California’s funeral home sublet—no one wants to enter, but if life goes your way, it’s where you’ll end up.

Being inducted into the club means other folks—close friends, faces at a funeral, folks you haven’t heard from in a while—will share how they landed their own membership. It’s one time in life when you’re desperate to hear advice from people who’ve been through it already. In Blink, Gladwell famously suggested that we make our minds up about others in the blink of an eye. That’s precisely how long it takes me to understand whether the person I’m talking to has been inducted into the club already.

One friend shared early: “No words will get you through this. Time and self-compassion are the only balms.” Another told me of their mother, gone 20 years, and how her love of music spread forward into the present day. One lost his father five years ago and talked about the slow steps forward required. One lost her mother from cancer within the last 12 months, still reeling, trying to make sense of the world without her in it. A close friend opened up, sharing his recollection of his mother’s death and having only recently realised he didn’t mourn her passing. He was young, and there were no older men to model emotional maturity, vulnerability, and resilience. Close to two decades later, the idea of a man showing a full emotional range is still frowned upon in many male social circles.

When times get hard, our natural inclination is to close down. To become a pangolin and roll ourselves up in the hope that nothing can hurt us. But, echoing what I’ve learned in four years of TNF, these are the moments you don’t want to hide away. Fight that instinct. Life offers these opportunities to pull towards your most important people. Grief is a rough ride. We are never prepared for it, even if we kid ourselves. And it's dangerous to go alone.

Many men build walls incessantly. We build them up to survive the hardships that early life may have thrown at us. We build them up to prevent ourselves from getting hurt again, from falling another time. We build them up in the mistaken belief that they’ll protect us. But what they’re shutting out isn’t sharp objects and foreign invaders. They’re shutting us off from each other. Death allows you to pull down that wall, realising it serves you no longer. You can keep putting energy into hoisting them up. Or you could lay down your arms and accept your time will come, as it will for us all.

I’ve been back in Manchester since the funeral. Being home hurts, as it should. It’s the pain of negative space, the opposite of joy, the darkness that remains when a light source is removed. It’s the feeling that comes from taking a step forward onto what you assumed was solid ground, only to see your foot plunge up to its ankle in cold water. It hurts.

I spent time up at the grave. It’s the most beautiful space. When we first found it, stories of deers roaming the grounds painted a heavenly picture. We planted one of Mum’s favourite trees close by, and then the reality hit home, with the deer arriving nightly to strip the tree of its nutrients. I helped my dad put a protective mesh around the trunk. The deer seem disinterested. I sit and tell Mum what’s going on with the family, how proud she’d be of how we’re coping without her. I continue to read to her, the same Bill Bryson trek through the Appalachian trail I started during her last weeks together. I cry. I realise that’s entirely the point. When someone we love dies, the pain we feel correlates to the love we felt. Back in Barcelona, I could get my head down, work, and imagine she was still with us, that we’d just not spoken for a while. That’s impossible sat graveside.

I look back on the last month she was here, scattered threads woven into the fabric of a rope severed too soon. I recall moments no one can prepare you for—furiously trying to make it to the GP to pick up “a piece of paper” before it closed for the weekend, “the piece of paper” in my hand, the sudden realisation I’m holding a Do Not Resuscitate order that could be what ends her life.

Like I said. It’s been a rough six months. And that’s just what I’ve been going through.

---

Kids, meet Death

Our dog is 12. He’s a Basset Hound, hitting what Google tells us is the high end of his life expectancy. Every pet comes with a promise—it will die, hopefully before you do. Branston—his mum was Pickle, so that’s his name—has been here longer than the kids. They’ve never known a world without him, and I hoped the dog would be an on-ramp to talk mortality with them. I didn’t think he’d outlast Mum, that’s for sure. Bassets are known for their stubborn nature.

In lieu of a pet—dog, cat, goldfish or gerbil—the passing of a family elder is the first introduction to death for most kids. Experiencing grief through the death of a grandparent is like learning to ride a bike with the training wheels attached. It’s only decades later you realise how hard it is to stay up straight without them. You lose a parent and need to grieve at the same time you’re teaching your kids about death, impermanence and the afterlife in an age-appropriate manner. Have you tried to explain death to a five-year-old? His primary exposure was Darth Maul getting sliced in half at the end of The Phantom Menace; and Maul returns—with metal legs—in The Clone Wars a few years later. Books always help: Grandads’s Island and The Heart and the Bottle have remained close to hand. We press play on Coco, and I cry like I did when I first saw it on the big screen 6 years earlier. Back then, my granny was leaving us; now it’s theirs.

You choose how to talk to your children about death. We’ve started watching Malcolm in the Middle with the kids—they’re probably a bit young but we’re having fun, some jokes sail happily over their heads, the parents are trying to have sex a lot more than I remember. This week, Hal explained death to Dewey:

A few weeks before Mum passed, we were all in the house together—she was sick, sleeping on and off, but the house was full of the comings and goings of her six grandchildren. She was happy. Trying to explain what was happening to my son, we told him, “Soon, Nanny will go to sleep, and she won’t wake up.” The next day, she walked into the living room, and he turned to me with an amazed look on his face—as if he was a shepherd on the morning of Easter Sunday, and Jesus himself had woken up and walked out of the cave: “I thought you said she wasn’t waking up?”

“It will be a while longer.” I laughed. How could you not? It was the kind of exchange you can only ever have with a five-year-old. The same week, he asked us if “Nanny has decided what animal she wants to come back as yet.” I had to explain—no, that’s your Nani and Nana, who are Hindu and believe in reincarnation. Your Nanny and Grandad are Catholic and believe in Heaven. You could see the cogs turning in his head.

I can still see the huge smile on Mum’s face when I told her that one.

---

In 2007, Haruki Murakami explored What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a quasi-memoir detailing escapades in training for 20+ marathons and ultramarathons. An insight comes to him amidst an excruciating bout of mid-race pain: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” It’s a mantra I’ve held close to since. But during the last six months, I’ve found myself disagreeing with Murakami. Pain is something that comes and goes. But the suffering of grief? It’s ever-present, unavoidable.

Maybe ever-present is a touch too strong? On returning to Barcelona after her funeral, I took a few weeks' downtime before returning to the group boxing lessons I’ve been attending this year. In the midst of a session, I came to a realisation of my own: it’s impossible to grieve and punch simultaneously. At Sonar Festival a few weeks later I realised it’s impossible to grieve and dance too.

I searched for clues from others who had trodden this path. I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, a book I’ve recommended—even gifted—to others but had never found the need to read for myself; a charting of waters uncharted, Didion famously tells us that “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it:”

We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect the shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to "get through it," rise to the occasion, exhibit the "strength" that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves the for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day?

We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief was we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

I went back Faith, Hope and Carnage, and was uplifted by Nick Cave’s promise of better times ahead:

Please don’t misunderstand it, but since Arthur died I have been able to step beyond the full force of the grief and experience a kind of joy that is entirely new to me. It was as if the experience of grief enlarged my heart in some way. I have experienced periods of happiness more than I have ever felt before, even though it was the most devastating thing ever to happen to me. This is Arthur’s gift to me, one of the many.

The Leftovers was high on the list of shows I wanted to watch. It shot to the front of the list. I read the book a long time ago—didn’t love it, fwiw—but the show consumed me in a way that few things have for a long time. It made me realise what a gift it is to be able to grieve. “Why are you watching that?” a friend suggested, hoping to save me. It was exactly what I needed: a resonant pain to help me navigate my own.

I found poetry that could communicate in a way nothing else could:

I listened to music. Not too much Elliott Smith—it’s been tough, but I’ve spared myself the self-flagellation—but Sufjan Steven’s Carrie And Lowell, written after the death of his parents, is a touching tribute and lesson in baring your heart when you’re left orphaned. I learned to stop rolling my eyes at adults using that word. I’ve cried almost every time I listened to the opening track of Adrianne Lenker’s Bright Future, “a child humming into the clarity of black space,” recalling searching for her mother after the first movie that made her feel scared, maternal warmth on a hospital visit at fourteen, and a child seeing her mother tears for the first time:

I never saw you cry
Not until our dog died
And the whole family came back together
We held her body as they put the needle in her
And then I saw you cry

My mum never heard this song. I listened to it before and after the timeline cleaved; it is now intertwined with her memory forever. She would have liked it. I went to a friend’s house and saw a copy of Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, a book I’d marked as “wanting to read” when I encountered its colourful cover and promise of a new perspective on grief in NYT’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. I opened to an epigraph from Natalia Ginzburg, a warning from the future: “You have to realise that you cannot hope to console yourself for your grief by writing.”

Nevertheless, he persisted. I picked up Demon Copperhead. Went to log it on Goodreads. I was startled by Mum’s face and a review I’d never seen. She loved it. She always loved a good book about a bad childhood. Her review was manna from heaven, a message from beyond. Here was what I was thirsty for—we could still talk about our favourite books, even if it would only ever be one way. I went through her top-rated books, picked a few more to read. They made me feel closer to her. I read Angela’s Ashes (I told you, she was a glutton for punishment). I laughed all the way through, and cried at the end when Frank McCourt shared an old Irish song, “A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing:”

An Irish boy was leaving
Leaving his native home
Crossing the broad Atlantic
Once more he wished to roam
And as he was leaving his mother
Who was standing on the quay
She threw her arms around his waist
And this to him did say:

‘A mother’s love’s a blessing
No matter where you roam
Keep her while she’s living
You’ll miss her when she’s gone
Love her as in childhood,
Though feeble, old and grey
You’ll never miss a mother’s love
’til she’s buried beneath the clay.

Love you, Mum. We all miss you so much.

Mum and Me, San Francisco, 2017

---

Wrapping Up

You’ve either been through this nodding along, or you’ll be back here later.

I’m a bit all over the place, but that kinda sums up this year. How was it?

Loved | Great | OK | Meh | Bad

See you next week.