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Luckily, I already knew having a comic thought at a tragic moment is a natural stress response, or I might have worried. My mum has died, making me an orphan – and what first popped into my head was how annoyed Larry David would be.
In Curb Your Enthusiasm, when Marty Funkhouser’s mother’s wheelchair was run over by a car, he proclaimed himself an orphan. David informed him he was too old to be an orphan. Funkhouser insisted that if your parents are dead, you’re an orphan.
“You could be 70 and be an orphan?” David challenged.
“You could be 100 and be an orphan!’ Funkhouser maintained.
“You can’t be 100 and be an orphan.”
“Yeah, you can.”
“OK, Little Orphan Funkhouser,” concluded David.
Images of Annie-like red curls aside, the people who brought you into the world both having left it is pretty profound. I’m lucky to have a lot of support, but it’s a hard knock in life. A singularly specific brand of aloneness; the natural order that feels anything but. It’s so weird. There’s no one to tell me off any more, either. I wonder what I may get up to. What if I fall in with a bad crowd?
My mum “had a good innings though”, as I have been reminded roughly thrice daily. It’s been 14 years since my dad died, and there’s so much I’d forgotten about the grief game – namely the platitudes, the strange language, and how terrible so many of us are at dealing with it. The best reaction so far was a bloke who replied to my breaking of the news for sadmin purposes with: “OK, that’s fine.” At least he gave me a good story.
The main disclaimer here is that I do believe everyone is trying their best. It’s a serious minority who are deliberately attempting to offend or upset you “at this difficult time”. Most human beings are just hopeless at talking about death.
I also know that a lot of this is subjective. For example, it’s safer to err on the side of caution and use fluffy euphemisms such as “passed away” and “resting”. However, as a dyed-in-the-wool fan of simply saying “died”, that fluff grates. “Please accept my condolences” is ridiculous, because it sounds as if there’s a chance you might reply in the negative, outraged at the very idea. My least favourite is “I don’t know what to say” – and then a blank, expectant look, as though they are genuinely hoping you’ll provide a shortlist of suggestions. I’m also not that into “you have to be strong”. Because, why do I have to? The best way out is always through, surely.
But the absolute worst thing to say to the bereaved is nothing at all. Richard E Grant has spoken before about some longstanding friends who crossed the road to avoid him after his wife’s death. This week, he said that he’d never forgive them.
“I’m very unequivocal, black and white, all or nothing,” he said. “I’ve tried to go for the grey areas but it’s not succeeded for very long. There are people that have been edited out of my life and I will never see them again. If I had done that to them, I wouldn’t be able to look them in the face ... No, portcullis down, goodbye.”
What Grant endured was extreme, but most people who have “lost” (which sounds like absent-mindedly mislaying something) somebody have experienced the deafening sound of silence. You’re conversing with someone who doesn’t acknowledge the enormous way your universe has shifted, and it’s as if you’ve grown a second head that they pretend not to notice. Again, they’re almost definitely not doing it intentionally – they aren’t mentioning it because you seem OK right at this second (AKA you aren’t crying), and they don’t want that to change, or to remind you what’s happened, just in case you have completely forgotten. They mean well, and focusing on that fact is how you manage not to snap at them. (Grief can make you really tetchy, another aspect of it that had slipped my mind.)
So now I’m back in the sad saddle, a PSA that platitudes, euphemisms and cliches are excruciating. However, nothing is as awful as having to interact with somebody for whom all words on the subject have dearly departed. Even arguing about the age limit for claiming orphan status is better than that.
Polly Hudson is a freelance writer
