My Friend's Mom Would Be Horrified We Met This Way

I'd never met my friend's mom. I felt like I knew her anyway, that's what fifteen years of close friendship does. So when the day came to drive to Ottawa for her funeral, I walked into the room, saw my friend standing beside the open casket, and went to hug her.

"Ohh Tammy," she said, "my mom would be horrified to know she's meeting you this way. She'd get up but..."

We lost it. Full, real, can't-catch-your-breath laughter. Next to a casket. In front of a room full of people giving us the exact side-eye you're picturing right now.

We didn't care. That's our humour. And it gave us a jolt of levity we both needed on one of the hardest days of the year. I was a weepy mess again about thirty minutes later... that part's true too. Both things happened. Neither one canceled the other out.

That's the part almost nobody tells you about grief: it doesn't take turns with joy. It doesn't wait politely for laughter to finish before it comes back. They're not opposites sitting on either end of some emotional spectrum. They're roommates. They share the same couch.

This is what I mean when I talk about grief illiteracy, the idea that most of us were never taught how to hold more than one feeling at a time, so when two "opposite" ones show up together, we assume something's wrong with us. Nothing's wrong with you. You're just fluent in more than you were told you'd need to be.

If you're looking for permission to let humour and creativity into your grief instead of just the heavy stuff, here's where I'd point you.

Where Grief Gets Funny

Read: I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. The title alone tells you what you're in for... the mess, the relief, the guilt, all in one sentence. Readers keep landing on the same word: candor. Dark, funny, unflinching candor. (She's also got a great conversation on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast if you want to hear it in her own voice first.)

Watch: Taylor Tomlinson's Look at You on Netflix. When she gets to the stretch of jokes about her mom, she pulls her stool right up to the edge of the stage, as close to the audience as she can get, and basically dares them to be uncomfortable with her. It's not shock value. It's an invitation. And a room full of strangers takes her up on it every time.

Scroll: Yes, the internet has a whole genre of death and funeral humour, and yes, it's exactly as unhinged and cathartic as you'd hope (and yes, that same friend I mentioned off the top, we have a shared Instagram folder precisely for this). Follow the thread if you need proof that you are nowhere near the first person to laugh at the worst possible moment.

Where Grief Gets Creative

Read: What's Your Grief has a piece on grief and creative blocks that I still think about... the advice for getting unstuck creatively works almost identically for getting unstuck emotionally. Worth the read either way.

Watch: The Art of Grieving by Preston Zeller. He commits to one abstract painting a day for a year after losing his 35-year-old brother. Watching the paintings shift over the months is watching grief move in real time, better than any stage-of-grief chart I've ever seen.

Sit with: Elizabeth Gilbert's post after the death of her wife, Rayya, where she writes about a line from Michael Prechtel... that all true grief carries an element of rejoicing, but only if you let all of it in at once. Gilbert's line back: we dance because it hurts too much not to.

I believe that. I've watched people bring the light of who they are into the darkest room they'll ever stand in, and come out having made something out of it instead of just surviving it.

Before you go... grab your journal

When grief shows up, do you let yourself feel the whole range of it, or do you quietly edit some of it out? What would it cost you to stop editing?
Think of a time you laughed while grieving. What was the moment? What did it give you that the tears alone couldn't?
What's your creative outlet — the one that's actually yours? How might it hold something your words can't say directly right now?

Grief isn't one note. Neither are you.