On Grief, or: People Stop Showing Up
Thoughts/FEELINGS, peculiar music, and actions to improve our world, from Dave Maher.
I’m haunted by the updates Elijah McClain’s mom leaves on his GoFundMe page. They’re so raw. They don’t fit the narrative of a grieving parent feeling grateful for people honoring their child’s memory.
From August 14, 2020:
I haven’t gone through his belongings yet, I am waiting for a better frame of mind before I tackle the box his bloody clothes are in. I need my energy for that and other motherly responsibilities, I can’t entertain the world, I’m not a celebrity yall, I’m a mother mourning the death of her son.
It’s been a year since her son’s death, and she hasn’t gone through his belongings. Grief takes time.
On March 13, 2015, I posted this on Facebook (remember Facebook?):
Facebook may be the absolute dumbest place for me to make this point, but here goes: if you consider me a friend at all, could you please ask me more direct questions about the coma? I don't understand what you went through when you thought you had lost a friend, but I'd like to try. Are you pissed? Confused? Cold? Tell me. I can handle it. I'm rebuilding my whole life right now at a time when a lot of my closest friends and creative peers have moved away from the place that I've called home for the longest period of my life, and straight up, it's fucking lonely. I'm glad you're happy I'm back and so glad to be back, but I'm not better, in feeling or in personality. At the same time as I'm trying to rebuild and make positive changes in my life, I'm still the same prickly dude who hates authority and thinks his own personal problems are grand injustices for the world to solve. I'm not proud of feeling like a victim, but I think because I'm loud and strident and can formulate the occasional thought that people think I'm confident and can take care of myself. I can't. I'm frightened all the time. I love life so much, and I want to love it more and be better in it. I don't know what the point of posting this is, except that maybe people who feel similarly alone and forgotten and old news and not living up to their own, their friends' and strangers' expectations of them see that I'm asking for help. I'm demanding it. Please put your love into action, and I'll do the same. Being polite is not being friends.
It had been four months since I’d woken up from a coma, and I felt alone.
I got to thinking about these things after reading an article called “Everyone is checking in during the pandemic. Where were you when I had breast cancer?,” which includes this:
A handful of close friends checked in periodically, but for the most part, nobody asked how I was doing unless I proactively sent an update. Then there were the “one and done” friends — after one call or text to say they were sorry to hear the news, I never heard from them again. I felt forgotten.
There’s a blind spot in the way we care for people who experience a trauma. We support them intensely right afterward, and then we disappear.
My best theory why is resilience. Humans are mind-bogglingly good at bouncing back from things, but the flip side of resilience is we turn shit normal and numb to it real quick. People have to eat and earn their livings. They can’t spend all their time calling someone with cancer, post-coma, or who lost a child.
Life is huge, and life is small. Life is terrible, and it keeps moving.
Sometimes, to keep moving, we assume the person in pain is healing quicker than they are, or that they have enough people checking in already.
We overwhelm the suffering with attention when they are least able to process it, when they are still in shock their trauma occurred. We comfort them for grief they’re not even experiencing yet.
Real grief is unwieldy. It doesn’t come in stages so much as slides in a View-Master that switch violently, get stuck, then start spinning again. And if you can’t share about that disorienting experience with someone, you feel like a ghost.
This shortcoming of support extends past tragedy and grief. I had a buddy tell me how quickly people disappeared after his kid was born. The flurry of congrats and meals lasted a couple weeks then flatlined just as he and his wife were settling into their new reality.
It’s clear we need to give each other better support in the weeks, months, and years after a trauma.
Social media complicates the issue because attention is real easy to throw around. I spent an embarrassingly long time after waking up from my coma assuming I was entitled to a Facebook-eulogy level of attention for the rest of my life. Online attention is intoxicating and misleading, especially after a traumatic experience.
The key for those suffering is differentiating Attention from Support. Any schmo you took improv classes with can send a “so sorry you’re experiencing this, thinking of you buddy.” The people who show up to take you on a walk, bring you food or take you out to eat, and just listen on the phone no matter how long it takes you to form words—these people are the ones you need.
More importantly, these are the people we need to be. I’m not suggesting we have to spread ourselves thin providing consistent, long-term Support to acquaintances, but if we have a Support Friend who needs us, we better be providing more than just Attention. Texts are fine, but calls are better. Car rides, hand holding, hugs, better still.
Who knows when these deeper expressions of intimacy will be available to us again? It’s a bitter irony of COVID that the ways of connecting we need most could kill us.
On the other hand, we don’t have to wonder right now who needs our support. The first person you think of could use a call. Make it, then set a reminder to follow up next month.
This Week’s “This Is Your Afterlife”
Kyra Jones is my guest on Episode 9. She’s an actor and filmmaker, and her funeral will be very sex-positive.
Wamp Wamp (What to Do)
Reach out to a friend who’s going through some shit (even more than we all are now). I’ve gotten this exhortation from others, felt like it was nice, then basically dismissed it. But if me saying it now can get through to you, try it!
In the process of writing this newsletter, I found an old high school friend who asked me to ask my dad (an oncologist) for a doctor recommendation after her cancer diagnosis. I told her I’d ask him and never did. That was in November. Thankfully, she’s still here, so I apologized and asked if there’s anything I can do to help her now.
I share that just to say: it can be embarrassing and hard to do this kind of follow-up. But we got to. I mean, you just know we got to. Right?Tell me what you think about that NPR recycling story (TLDR: Corporations Knowingly Mislead Public, surprise surprise). I can’t get it out of my head, and I’m honestly wondering if I should stop recycling. If the recyclers aren’t actually recycling plastic and it’s cheaper to trash it, is it responsible to fill the blue bin knowing we’re just wasting extra money in the process of adding to the landfill?
Celebrate (understatedly). Last week, we raised a total of $15 for Mask Oakland, an organization that distributes masks to homeless communities in the Bay Area. You might notice that’s the amount I donated, which is okay. I realize these weekly fundraisers are going to wax and wane in the amounts they raise. So, we keep on!
Donate to Elijah McClain’s GoFundMe. Again, if you already have. Think of it as an exercise in following up.
I just added a donation of $5 (shit’s tight these days). Reply with what you donate, and I’ll post our total next week!
May I Play You a Sound?
This Smog song is a different take on isolation than the post-traumatic social desertion we’ve been talking about. It captures that way being alone can feel weirdly pure, even when it’s shit.
I think about the ideas in this song probably once a month. Read the lyrics as/before you listen. It’s such a clear scene, but it feels alien to me because of specifically general phrases like “special underwear.” And then the hunter on the street thing (is it a metaphor?) at the end just refuses to let my mind fully grasp it.
The whole song is knotted, odd, real, and fake.
Prince Alone in the Studio
Prince alone in the studio
It’s two a.m. and all the girls are gone
The girls thought they were going to be able
To have sex with him
They wore their special underwear
Once the tracks were laid down
Prince’s back turned around
Raspberry headphones on his head
On his earsPrince alone in the studio
It’s three a.m.
Prince hasn’t eaten in eighteen hours
Dinner’s burned on the stove
But Prince, he doesn’t even knowPrince alone in the studio
It’s four a.m.
And he finally gets that guitar track right
And it’s better than anything any girl could ever give him
Because Prince is alone
Prince is alone
Oh Prince, you are so aloneAnd when it’s all complete
He feels like a hunter on the street
And when it’s all complete
He feels like a hunter on the street
‘Til next week, next month, next year,
DM
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Who is Dave Maher?
I’m a writer/performer and comedian who creates one-man shows that combine standup, theater, improvisation, storytelling, and performance art. I also teach, act, and do voiceover. I've appeared on/at/with This American Life, the Edinburgh Fringe, Steppenwolf Theatre, the Annoyance Theatre, and the Neo-Futurists, and I used to write for Pitchfork.