Grief Talk

Let's get uncomfortable!

Last week, my friend James came to one of my gigs. I’m very good friends with his girlfriend Toria, who is also recently bereaved, so I rarely get time alone with him to talk. We spoke about music, about life, about how me and Toria bonded deeply over our dark senses of humour. And then he said something to me that has rattled around in my head ever since - he said, “So, how have you been?” I looked at him, puzzled. We’d been talking for a good 15 minutes by then. I clarified - “What, with life?” He looked me square in the face and said, “How have you been with the grief? Tori always says no one asks her about it but it’s really all she wants to be asked about. So how are you doing with it all?” 

I was kind of floored by this. Not just because it’s rare that someone would offer to deep dive into Pandora’s Extremely Depressing Box, but because he was completely right. It was the perfect question. It wasn’t prying, or too specific, it left me room to wiggle out and give a vague answer if I needed, or get into it if I wanted to. It was brave, compassionate, and it got me thinking about the aversion to sadness that keeps people from asking about grief. I think a lot of it comes from fear of the answer. 

Grief is weird. It does strange things to people. It’s really difficult to rationalise something truly permanent. Nothing in life is permanent, not really. Weather moves, seasons change. Relationships end, breakups are reconciled. So much of therapy and self help revolves around teaching people to accept change, to come to terms with the constant relativity of circumstance. Learning to steer into the skid is a skill, and not one that comes lightly. Death, on the other hand, flies in the face of absolutely everything we know about life. Debates about afterlife presence aside, the one thing no one can argue is that Earthly life definitely, conclusively, and inarguably comes to an end one day. The person in question is gone as we knew them. Forever. Permanently. 

The longer you think about this, really think about what eternity means, the less grip on sanity it feels like you have. We are not designed to think about it. Hell, humans even constructed countless elaborate explanations as to why death is not forever -- we’ll be reunited, redeemed, or reincarnated. And all of that might be true! But it doesn’t make the permanence of the physical loss any less real, tragic, or affecting. It’s still forever, just tied up in a nice ethereal bow. 

The brain of a grieving person is working overtime to try and cram this sudden awareness of eternity into day to day life. After the illusion of the suspended present is shattered, you come out the other side just different. The gnawing curiosity about whether or not the person you miss is watching, or frolicking through a field, or nowhere at all -- it doesn’t go away. Sometimes it’s not even a conscious thing, I’m not intentionally churning over the implications of mortality while I’m in Aldi choosing a chicken for dinner, but it does colour those moments with a nihilistic undertone. Things are now weighed on a scale of 1 to Death, and normal life begins to feel an awful lot like someone doing jumping jacks next to a seismometer and expecting earthquake alarms to sound. The spare headspace you might have once had for mental gymnastics or problem solving is now occupied full time with suppressing this internal conundrum, just so you can get up in the morning and not crumble under the weight of it all. There’s very little energy left to allocate to dissecting a dirty look or humouring a friend. Sometimes there’s none left to even help you cook that chicken, or brush your teeth in the morning. Sometimes you do crumble under it and you just have to try again tomorrow. 

To me, this is the most commonly misunderstood thing about grief, that the immobilising force of it isn’t always sadness. This is where TV shows get it wrong when they show bereaved people staring longingly at boxes of photographs, comforted deeply by being told that their loved one “would be so proud.” There are days like that, sure, but most of the time we spend pinned beneath the grief it’s because we have had our eyes opened to something so big it defies logic. Something you can imagine, but only once you see someone you love devoid of life in front of you do you truly understand. Your whole life stops, in situations like mine it stops for months while someone you would do anything for just gets sicker and sicker. You watch the very spark of life leave a person, watch them go from animated to unanimated in the blink of an eye. There is no fanfare, no glowing ball of light that floats out into the room. It is so permanent, so irreversible, and yet so underwhelming. They’re just gone. Still. Dead. Forever. 

And then you just, what, go back to work? Make small talk with your friends? Try not to have a breakdown this week in the supermarket? The world just keeps ticking on around you, concerning itself with banality and routine, as if the fabric of the universe hasn’t just been ripped in half right in front of your eyes. Why is no one else freaking out about this, you wonder as you watch someone calmly read the ingredients on a pack of sausages three trolleys down. Why are we all here in the first place if it just comes to such an unsatisfying end on a day that’s totally normal to everyone else in the world? Why did our cells go to so much trouble to fuse and grow and animate us into these complex, troubled creatures in the first place? So we could just pick out a chicken in some bright, overstimulating grocery store and drag it home and make a roast dinner we’ll forget about in a few days time when the wheel of the week starts churning again? 

That night, I answered James’s question as honestly as I could; I told him I have been struggling with my grief. I gave him a much lighter version of the same rant you’ve just humoured. He listened. It helped. I realised how much I needed to talk about everything, but I understand why people are afraid to ask about it directly. I know a lot of them are afraid that asking me is uncomfortable or upsetting. I know a lot of them are afraid that my answer might be uncomfortable or upsetting. But there is no other situation I can think of that can so deeply change a person and their fundamental worldview and have so little place in day to day conversation. Every day the time between me and my loss grows bigger, as does the subtle pressure to rationalise it. Every time someone asks me how I am, it relates to my grief less and less as new bullet points of life flood the gap between me and the day my dad died.

Despite all of this I would still class myself as a remarkably optimistic person. I am pretty comfortable with the notion that our mortality does not negate our capacity or our need for joy. And I know on the sunnier, more rational days that it doesn’t matter why we’re here, it matters that we’re here. Some days the grief feels lighter and more buoyant, manageable with the help of friends and some deep breathing exercises. Some days it feels boundlessly sad, and I feel the emptiness of my father’s presence like an aching phantom limb. But it’s the secret third setting, the existential dread that bubbles up and takes me by surprise, whispering, “what’s the point?” that I never seem to see coming. This is the side of the grief I’m often nervous to share, because there is no fixing it. It doesn’t feel fair to give something so futile to someone else and yet it’s the part I am almost always the most desperate to talk about. It’s the part that makes being a musician really hard sometimes. I’d be lying if I said there weren’t moments on stage when singing about breakups from seven years ago has felt ridiculous now I know what I know. Even the song about my father feels strange to sing, to market and promote something born of utter pain and desperation. One day I’ll have more music to reflect the change that has occurred within me, but first I have to reconcile the old and the new Ilanas as they collide in my catalogue and my personality. 

Something I know helps is talking about it. Forcing Existential Dread Ilana to coexist with Normal Person Ilana is like introducing two cats. We begin by letting them sniff each other through a baby gate, maybe working in a few supervised visits. And I know other grieving people are struggling with the same internal conundrum, but maybe don’t have a beautiful friend brave enough to ask them how they are and mean it. Whatever the situation, there is no down side to Grief Talk, to admitting that it is real and scary and it messes with your head. There is no shame in admitting that death makes no sense, that messages from ladybugs or flickering lights really help that gnawing emptiness, or in having a breakdown while cuddling a chicken at the grocery store. 

My advice? Mince some garlic and mash it in with a hunk of butter and some dried herbs and rub it all over that chicken. Cover it with foil and cook it in a really hot oven for 45 minutes. Take the foil off towards the end. Invite someone who loves you over to share it. Serve it with potatoes and carrots and have a really good cry and be honest about how strange it feels to be trying to live a normal life again. Save the bones to make soup tomorrow. You’ll get up tomorrow. Repeat this every Sunday until it feels a little less bizarre. It might take a while. That is okay. Grief is weird.