Grief Graffiti

I just listened to the podcast, “All There Is” by Anderson Cooper, Season 3, where he interviews Andrew Garfield about grief & loss. It is so beautiful and filled my soul with such peace that I have to share some excerpts. I recommend listening to the whole interview, and subscribing to the podcast. It’s so healing.

I will share the excerpts here that spoke the most to me & why. Andrew talks about his mother’s “fight” with cancer before she passed. I found it relatable to addiction & the suffering my son experienced:

She hung in like, I was about to say, she fought it. But I don’t like that language. I don’t like the idea of “defeating” cancer. It doesn’t feel fair to me that that language is used because my mum fought until she couldn’t fight anymore and it doesn’t make her not a success story. I reject the idea that she was defeated in any kind of way by any kind of thing. She fought it for a long time. We treated it in lots of different ways. She suffered. That’s the thing that I still am struggling with when I really think about it, that I can’t reconcile with the concept of a higher power or the concept of of God or some universal cosmic design.

Here he shares a beautiful story from his early grief. The concept somehow brought such comfort:

I’ve had some profound moments with nature. And this one was one of the most. I think it was before she passed. She was really sick, and it was unsure what the future would be like. I could feel in my body this tightness in my chest, like my solar plexus area. And, you know, it’s like, there’s something there. And I can’t cry. I can’t like, there’s no release here right now. I’m just anxious and I am stuck somewhere and I can’t relax and I’m fidgety and I’m maybe having like a low level panic attack. So I go for a walk on the beach and it’s not a very pleasant day. It’s kind of cold early autumn, and the waves are pretty wild and gray and choppy. And without thinking, I strip down and I find myself submerged in in the ocean. And it just kind of happened like a flash. It was like a download of information. I get a bunch of information or a bunch of knowledge, and then I’m able to put it into some kind of words. It’s a bizarre thing that happens.

As soon as my full body and head were submerged, it was like I got the medicine and my chest released and I let it all go. My interpretation of that moment was that it was the wisdom of nature, the wisdom of the earth, the wisdom of the ocean, letting me know, hey, yeah, it’s hard. It’s horrible. I’m not taking away this unique pain you’re feeling. But just so you know, us out here, us water molecules, we’ve been seeing this for millennia. And actually, this is the best case scenario for you to lose her rather than for her to lose you. This is a much better situation. And again, my ego was holding on. My ego thought I knew better. My ego said, no, this doesn’t make sense. No, no, no. It shouldn’t be this way. It should be that way. But actually, it took the ocean, the greater opponent, to just hold me under and say it’s really horrible. And sons have been losing their mothers for thousands and thousands of years. And they will continue to. And you’ve just been initiated into that awareness and into that reality. Some illusion has been lifted. You’re in a realer version of the world now, and it’s painful.

I guess my ears were open enough to hear all my body was open to, and maybe it was her. Maybe the pain in my chest was like a depth of longing to understand and to want. It was like I was asking for comfort. Like I had to. We have to ask to be helped in these moments. Otherwise, we don’t we don’t get any medicine. We don’t get the help. We have to be in enough pain and enough longing to say, help me. And only with that, with collaborating in that way, with approaching the mystery. And in that way of with all that vulnerability and with all that confusion and with all that looseness, do we get any kind of answer. I think the answer is relative to the question and the willingness to ask the question and the willingness to not know the answer. So I think the only thing I can take credit for in terms of receiving the information was I allowed myself to feel broken. I just allow myself to be in pain. And I didn’t run away from it. I ran towards it and I said, help me. And the ocean had a great answer, really tremendous answer. And I said opponent there about the ocean. But for me it’s more like it’s a mentor. It’s like a grandfather or a grandmother.

That idea, that people have been losing people for thousands and thousands of years, and they will continue to, but we’ve just been initiated into that awareness and into that reality, I find that so extraordinary. And that idea is something which I had never heard put into words like that. But there’s something comforting about it. Grief feels so lonely. And yet this is a road that has been well traveled. We think that what is happening to us is so unique and so tragic and so horrible, and yet it has happened to our ancestors & their ancestors before them. As Andrew goes on to say about Indigenous Peoples & their relationship with death:

Images came up for me of Indigenous People who we’re just playing catch up with here, you know what I mean? Like we modern descendants of colonizing, Western Descartesian, kind of values, cut off from the concept of death and the integrated connection to death. What you just described so poetically is something that all indigenous cultures know and practice and keep close to themselves. And the tragedy of the culture that we’ve been born into is this dislocation from that reality and the humility that it brings, the humility that an awareness of death and an awareness of fragility brings.

And this is just so beautiful and true:

I love talking about it, by the way. So if I cry, it’s only a beautiful thing. This is all the unexpressed love, right? The grief that will remain with us, you know, until we pass. Because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives till 60, to 15, or, you know, 99. So I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her. And I told her every day.

The grief is the only route to feeling her close again. That’s the crazy thing. Again, it’s the longing. It’s the admission of the pain. It’s the crying out, “I need you”. “Where are you?” “I miss you so much!” And only in the absence, only in really inhabiting that absence, being that little boy at the bottom of the empty cave in vast darkness and just kind of crying out. That’s the only moment that she comes. It’s so weird. It’s like the longing and the grief, fully inhabiting it and feeling it, is the only way I can really feel close to her again. The grief and the loss is the only route to the vitality of being alive. The wound is the only route to the gift.

Anderson then asks Andrew: “I heard you say something a while ago that after your mom died you felt like your psyche had been rearranged, that things tasted different. Can you explain? Do you feel like a different person?”

No, I feel like the same person. I just feel deeper in the same person, more expanded, more cracked open. It’s like the heart breaks and breaks and breaks and lives by breaking in times of great loss. And you expand. Hopefully you become bigger, the heart becomes bigger, you become more confused and less certain of anything. And for me, what I want to be is more curious about what we’re all doing here. Rather than narrow and driven and certain, I want it to break me open. I want to be lost. It feels healthier than to feel like you know where you are heading.

It’s scary. And real. It’s like the rest is illusion. Like the idea that we have any jurisdiction over where we’re going or control, it’s a fabrication. I really related to what you said about that drive we had to create a life, to build something, to run towards achievement and success. When my mom passed, I think two thirds of my ambition died with her. Or let me say it differently, two thirds of my previous ambition, the style, the type or the feeling of that ambition died. It’s unequivocal. Now I know for a fact that this is a short life, and the things that mattered before don’t matter anymore. And I think when I say things taste differently, I think I think things can taste much more sweet now because of the sorrow that I felt. And they can taste much more bitter. Like a friend of mine, Spike Jones, talked about it so beautifully to me when he was going through something similar. He said, “It’s like the landscape gets rearranged. It’s like where there was once a hill that you knew really well, there’s now a waterfall. And in the place where the river once was, now there’s just desert. And behind you, where your house was, there’s a swamp. It’s like the world is being re-revealed to you or revealed in a deeper way.

And lastly, he touches on what others did that meant the most:

 I have a really incredible group of friends. And they were ingenious in how they handled it emotionally. Very genius. And I feel very grateful for them. They would send me messages, and it would literally just be, “I’m here. I’ve got you.” It was like this net ofg love and care that a handful of friends assembled underneath me where my mother’s net used to be. It was like they all kind of joined hands and created a container for me to feel safe in the loss. And I wasn’t orphaned anymore, you know? I was to a degree, but the love, that held me, and it was so profound in its simplicity. It wasn’t complicated and it wasn’t fixing. None of these people tried to fix it. They didn’t try to run away from it either. But basically they were saying, if you need us to sit with you while you cry, we can do that. So maybe that appeals more for other people who are going through grief, because I know that that was a profound life saving thing for me and it allowed me to continue to stay in that process with myself and with the spirit of my mom and with my family. Because I knew I was being held by a larger web. And I include the ocean in that group of friends. I include the redwoods in that group of friends. I include my mother spirit in that group of friends. And ancestors. And art. And artists. And writers. And poets. And filmmakers. And theater. And Actors. Like, you know, I was held by great, generous, vulnerable artists who also said, “I need help with this”, and made me feel less alone.

I’m ending it here with his mother’s favorite poem that he read over & over to her in her last moments, and that is so touching:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

~Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

(You can now watch the video episodes of “All There Is” on CNN’s YouTube page. There’s also an online grief community. If you go there, you can hear for yourself some of the thousands of voicemails received from the podcast listeners. Hearing others talk about their experiences with grief is so powerful. It certainly has been for me. You can also leave comments of your own. It will be a supportive place for everyone. You can check out the online grief community at CNN.com/allthereisonline)