The flowthrough of grief
How do we balance the conflict of grief for people who influenced us that we never knew with grief for loved ones that have recently died?
I think it’s safe to say that if you’re reading this, you know about the loss of two artistic icons this week: David Bowie and Alan Rickman, both 69, both diagnoised with cancer. This comes just weeks after the news that Lemmy Kilmister, famed Motorhead bassist/singer/songwriter/everything, also died from the disease. I’m not going to be disingenious by going on about Lemmy, because I have maybe-but-probably-not heard the occassional Motorhead song that my partner blasts as he’s lifting weights. To say more would be a disservice to his loved ones and fans.
David Bowie and Alan Rickman, though, I can say a little more about. But I also want to say upfront that this isn’t a tribute post to them.
I want to talk about what it means to grieve the loss of these figures, even though I never knew them, even though the majority of the people grieving never knew them, while also grieving a personal loss.
I won’t say it any better than this article on Vox did when they publicized this tweet:
I reached out to talk to someone I knew would have informed opinons on this idea. Emmy Colon is a death midwife and the founder of The Parlor, an event series in Chicago geared to normalize our relationships with death. We talked about mourning, grief, and our own feelings as we heard the news — first about Bowie, then about Alan Rickman, then about my own news.
“Grief is personal and happens in waves,” she told me, “and typically one never stops grieving.”
In reference to the public grief of these figures, she made the following Facebook status:
To anyone who has been told they are “freaking out” for publicly grieving the recent (or even not-so-recent) loss of an artist, musician, actor, what have you, I have some things to say to you:
1) I’m so, so, so, sorry. You shouldn’t have to justify yourself to anyone. This ends up seriously screwing with the process of processing what you’re feeling. Please don’t do this to other people, people.
2) Yes. We know they were “celebrities”. They may not have been our friends, but they they helped us figure out/learn who we are at formative times in our lives. Queer kids held on to who they were cause of Bowie. Budding actors saw the range and excellence Alan Rickman brought to every role and that inspired them.
Mourning and grieving their loss or any loss for that matter is not you “freaking out”. It’s not only okay but healthy. If you grow tired of seeing posts, do what non-Star Wars/non-sports ball fans have done all this time and just ignore it. It’s that simple.
In my own way, I’ve been grieving the loss of Bowie and Rickman, too. The Goblin King awakened my sexuality at a young age, Labyrinth being a movie I simultaneously loved and feared as a child. Now that I look back, I wonder if it was a beginning signal of my impending genderqueer-dome. I’d look at Jareth with his long blonde hair and tight clothes and see in him elegance, un-gendered and beautiful. I didn’t ponder whether or not this was an “acurrate” male (or, more specifically, a heterosexual male) representation. What David Bowie gave me in that role was a sense of wonder, awe, and appreciation for human complexity. This isn’t even starting into his music.
Alan Rickman is another I met via the screen — but not, as many in my generation, as Snape. Disclaimer: I loathed Snape as a kid. I think we were supposed to hate him. He was unnecessarily cruel to Harry, and what his backstory did was make him sympathetic but didn’t excuse his cruelty. Alan Rickman’s portrayal, on the other hand, made every that’snotwhathappenedinthebook! moment more than worth it.
The first time I saw Alan Rickman in a movie was actually as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. My mother, a lifelong Jane Austen reader, introduced me to Masterpiece Theatre around the same time Jennifer Connolly was running around my screen in a white dress (and Colin Firth was jumping into the pond at Pemberley). And Rickman’s role as Colonel Brandon is simultaneously awkward and uncomfortable and touching. He is a master at the Austen love — an older, unsuitable suitor choosing to be noble and hide his love, but the protagonist realizes at the last moment that he is the one for her. It’s in a movie like that where he demonstrates what a masterful actor he was.
Then, of course, came his beloved role as Alexander Dane — and if you haven’t seen Galaxy Quest, I recommend you stop reading this and see it now. Every time I see it, I cry laughing so hard. His deadpan deliveries are foreshadows of his Snape-y self, and his self-deprication and sarcasm a call to the robot Marvin. So when he rolled around as our favorite slimeball Snivellus, he already had secured a place in my heart.
When I was processing the news of these two much-beloved celebrities, it was in the knowledge that my own grandfather would soon be joining them. Not 69 (his 91st birthday would have been next week) and not from cancer (“heart failure”), but another loss nonetheless. One week ago, my mother texted me letting me know that he had had a stroke in the middle of the night, so would I please pick up my brother?
That Thursday was a strange patterns of disconnected thoughts. That’s actually when I sat down to write this post — trying to figure out how I felt knowing that, at his age, he probably wouldn’t make it through. My feelings for my grandfather are complicated, and for another day. What stayed with me was this: while my mother had gone through the loss of her own mother a few years ago, my dad still had both of his parents. This was his dad who was hanging on, maybe.
For the past year or so, my dad has been telling me that he doesn’t think either of his parents would last for too much longer. I don’t think the stroke came as a surprise to him. In fact, I think it was more surprising that my grandfather seemed to make a recovery. When I went to visit him that Friday, he’d had a series of smaller strokes in the middle of the night. His left side was all but paralyzed. But he would wake up for a little bit, and he could say a few words.
I sat in the hospital with my grandmother, who I have even more complicated feelings about, and I think that was the beginning of grief for me. He had been her partner for almost seventy years — a literal lifetime. She went to stroke his head and feed him some water. It broke my heart to see her grief, so palpable, so thick that she carried it around her head like the proverbial raincloud.
Blackstar was released that day, and Bowie was gone by Monday. My grandfather was moved to rehab. Rickman soon followed, and my dad said he had regained some use of his left arm.
This morning, the 16th, at around 6 am, my dad called me. The call dropped before I answered, but I already knew. I called my parents’ house to hear my mom say it anyway, and got ready to go up.
In a way, grieving for two figures I didn’t know has made it easier for me to grieve the one I do. Or maybe harder. I’ve walked through today in a numb haze, helping my mother, sitting next to my grandmother and holding her hand. Maybe it’s because her grief has so totally taken over her body and mind that I can’t help but not let myself feel it. She has moved from lucidity to blubbering her words, her speech pattern changing in her wails, whining — I wish there was a kinder word for it, but in a child, it would have been whining — that she wanted to see him. That she should have stayed the night, even though he went in his sleep. Then she would forget again, and for a moment, focus on the conversation at hand, before the cycle started again.
I’ve watched my dad and his eldest sister take care of things in business fashion, his other sister run to a corner, her daughter trying to rationalize his passing to her. I called up one cousin, then another, and told them the news — since it seemed no one thought they would want to know. Or maybe they were trying to protect them. Either way, I feel shitty for having to tell him, and feel shittier still that my family thought they wouldn’t want to know right away. My eldest aunt’s son had a baby a few months ago, and he called up his mother, and then my dad, wishing he had brought up the baby to meet our grandfather. In that moment, I felt like my grief wasn’t as strong as theirs; I only cried right before my morning shower, then when my grandmother said he was no longer here, and I told her that he was in us — a phrase I usually hate.
In this day, it’s been especially helpful to have a death midwife for a best friend. Leading up to this week, talking about the different types of grief, what mourning actually meant, prepared me (somewhat) for today. I don’t feel like I’ve wasted my grief on Bowie and Rickman and am sapped for my grandfather. Rather, I just feel like his death is as distant as theirs, just in a different way.
“This isn’t a contest, Naseem,” she said, when I told her about the level of grief. “No one person’s grief is more valid than someone else’s.”
Muslim burials are different than others — things have to happen right away. By 2 pm today, they went to visit his body. Tomorrow, it’ll be washed, and prayers will be said at the mosque, and he’ll go into the ground on Monday. Ideally, this would have all happened today, but that’s how things go.
When my family readied to leave for their final visitation, I didn’t join them. I stayed home to watch my brother and gave the excuse that I didn’t want to have my last memory of him be his body. In reality, that doesn’t matter to me. His body might look more peaceful than when I did last see him — IV’ed and oxygen tank’ed and unable to move. The truth is, what they were doing might have been helpful to them, but not to me. I don’t think my grandfather has been to a mosque in my lifetime. It felt false, and wrong, to go now.
I talked to Emmy about this, and she helped me process what I was feeling. “Mourning and grief are not synonymous,” she had told me in an earlier conversation. “Mourning are the social stuctures imposed around rites of death.” And in reference to my disconnect, she said, “It might help you to do your own mourning ritual, since you don’t get much from what your family is doing. Maybe not with everyone around if you realize it doesn’t serve you, but there’s a reason for mourning rituals aside for decorum. Mourning him for you could be going and writing that post. Getting it out there.”
There is much more to this that I’m not feeling. There’s my grandmother still asking if he’ll come back, in the moments where it’s calm. It’s being told that it often takes men three months for realities to sink in, and waiting to see my dad cry for the first time. It’s wondering who was going to take care of my grandmother, who can’t live on her own, but — for a list of complicated reasons — shouldn’t come stay with us.
It’s in clutching my phone before my partner’s response comes in, wondering if this is going to happen to me in seventy years. If this is going to happen to my mom in thirty or forty. Is this the reason that people don’t want to fall in love? Because they’re trying to protect themselves from future grief? If that’s the case, I guess we’re doomed to fail. That brings me comfort, in some ways.
Before dinner, my dad said, “A few days ago, when I went to visit [my dad] in rehab, I asked him how his arm was. He shrugged it a bit and said, ‘Well, I’ve got to deal with it, don’t I?’ If there’s one thing you learn from him, learn that. He wasn’t bitter at what happened. He accepted it.”
And my mom said, “He treated the world with optimism and kindness, and God was kind to him in return. He had a good life, and the best possible way to die.”
And I think about men like David Bowie and Alan Rickman, who have more people than just their families grieving them, whose final moments were painful and unkind. My grandfather didn’t have much, but he did have a good life. Even as I struggle to find my own grieving process, I hold onto that. As long as we live a good life, is there more for which we can ask?
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Note: I apologize for any unclear train of thoughts and the disorganization of this essay. I wrote this on Jan 16th, but posted it when internet was available.
