My mother died just after Thanksgiving in 2007, and a few months later my first husband and I moved to Florida from upstate New York. Struggling with depression and anxiety—grief and moving had hit my mental health hard—I came across a television series streaming on Netflix called Dead Like Me. It was sarcastic and had Mandy Patinkin in a major role (swoon) and it was dark—nearly all the main characters were dead—and I loved it.
Years later, I tried to get my second husband to watch it with me, remembering how much comfort and entertainment I’d gotten from it, and, well, let’s just say he wasn’t into it. Actually, I wasn’t as into it as I thought I’d be. I put it down to having seen it before—I’m not one to re-watch things—but now I’m realizing that, yeah, I’m just not in the same space I was then. When I look back, I remember that I also fell for a movie called Wristcutters and listened to gruesome thrillers with the kind of villains that make me wonder if the end of humanity is really such a bad thing (I’ve forgotten the specific thrillers, thankfully).
Turns out, the interest—I won’t call it an obsession—in death and dying was part of my grieving. I wish someone had been able to tell me that back then. I wish anyone had told me anything about grieving. I would have liked to know the tv and movies and books other people went to, especially if those media were outside of their usual tastes. Even if those same things didn’t grip me, just knowing about this aspect of grieving would have made me feel more normal.
Because, of course, to me, nothing was normal. The person who’d known me and paid attention to me and witnessed my life since I was born—was gone. I didn’t know who I was in the absence of her attention and care. The ground felt unsteady, as though a crack might open any minute and not just me but everyone I loved would simply fall into the darkness.
Here’s the secret I know now, however: there is no normal when it comes to grief. There’s also no abnormal. We’re all weird people with odd angles that don’t fit into predetermined spaces on the best of days, so why would we fit when we’re suffering? Like, does anyone actually cry and still look pretty, like we see in movies all the time? Personally, my eyes swell up and my nose runs and my face becomes red in patches, and within about 45 minutes I have a sinus headache from all the snot. It’s not attractive, ok?
I’ve heard people talk about finding their car keys in the shower, donating most of their wardrobe, buying a tv for the bedroom and then never using it after the first month—all in grief. Others stopped feeling like they even could cry, worked extra hours, went into cat rescue. But nearly everyone I’ve talked to about grief has mentioned something they watched, read, or listened to intensely, often something out of the ordinary for them, that…helped. Maybe they didn’t even realize it was helping at the time, but they found themselves going perhaps five minutes without actively thinking about their loss, their misery; or they felt soothed, or slightly numbed, or vaguely distracted.
So I’m curious: what have been some of the shows, movies, books, or music that you found when you were/are grieving?
Initially after our daughter's death my husband and I could not watch anything. Everything hurt, everything was too painful. A friend recommended "Shrinking" and "After Life" and both shows helped us get through those days. I read a lot of grief books. For months, I lost the ability to read for pleasure, so I didn't read any novels but the most helpful grief book was "It's OK that you're not OK". I listened to the audiobook of "A Heart That Works" during that time, which I thought was very good.