THE COMEDIAN CHANGING HOW WE THINK ABOUT GRIEF
Laughing at life’s saddest moments can be hugely therapeutic, says comedian Cariad Lloyd, whose conversations on bereavement with fellow comics became a taboo-breaking podcast
In February 1998 my dad turned yellow. A turmeric hue engulfed him. He was initially diagnosed with liver cancer then, after some more scouting, they announced that it was the mostly incurable and hope-stealing pancreatic cancer. By April, he was dead. I was two weeks away from school exams, in complete shock and, I realise now, trying to accept that my childhood had also died. I had joined the Dead Dad Club, as my schoolfriend Hannah (also a long-standing member) used to call it. Everyone joins ‘the club’ eventually. All of us at some point will be touched by the painful bastard that is grief. I just arrived very underage and very confused.
I have been talking about death and grief since I was 15. My grief radar – or ‘griefdar’ – became increasingly strong and no matter where I was, whether at a student party or on a beach in Ibiza, I would find the person who was walking alongside grief and end up talking to them about what had happened to me as well.
I never minded talking. It felt wonderful to be able to offer some help, a hand-drawn map trying to guide them through the shock of the first terrible year. To be able to say, ‘Somehow you will come through this. ➤
You won’t get over it but eventually you will stand without feeling the ground sinking beneath you.’
In 2016, after years of having these conversations, I found myself wondering if anyone else would want to hear them. Then I thought, ‘My God, that sounds depressing.’ But what if I spoke to comedians, people used to making jokes at awkward moments? Perhaps that would be cheerier than the idea initially sounded.
So I started to record my first upbeat grief chats with comedy friends such as Adam Buxton and Sara Pascoe, who shared their experiences. With the birth of my first child two weeks overdue, I edited these audio files and put them on the internet as a downloadable podcast. I found them refreshing, honest and surprisingly funny, but I had no idea if anyone else would.
Then the emails began to arrive. I was taken aback by how many people felt the same way I did, or as Peep Show’s Robert Webb did, or had had the same experience as comedian Sara Pascoe. They thanked me and my guests for talking honestly, for speaking the thoughts they also had but felt too guilty to say out loud. It became clear that there was a need for these conversations, a need for a space to talk about grief. Here you could talk about your feelings without worrying that it would upset anyone. I was overwhelmed by comedian Jayde Adams’s honesty about her relationship with her sister’s cancer, hilariously shocked at the unbearably awful yet comic tales that David Baddiel told of having repeatedly to tell his father with Alzheimer’s that his mother had died, and touched by Gemma Whelan’s story (see opposite) of her dad’s final moments.
Hearing these people’s experiences began to help me with my own grief. The more I talked, the more I realised that I hadn’t spoken about so many aspects of my pain. I had held back for fear of people not understanding or making them feel uncomfortable.
In Griefcast – the name I gave my podcast – I was allowed to tell my story without fear of upsetting the living. I could be a griever and laugh and cry at the same time and be understood. I learned that we all miss our loved ones with a physical pain, a pain that makes you feel as if your heart and joy died with them; and that, mostly, you learn to live with it. It adapts and becomes a part of you.
There aren’t stages to tick off, and it’s not a narrative to finish. Grief is made up of waves that crash down and drown you one day, and a peaceful calm sea on other days. But you’re still on the beach. You can’t walk away from it, and after a while you don’t want to.
The more people I speak to and the more members of ‘the club’ I meet, the more I realise I wasn’t special or especially young when it happened to me. Grief happens to everyone. It’s as guaranteed as breathing. But, in accepting this, I don’t feel sad or terrified. I feel freer than I did when I didn’t talk about it.
To speak about death lets it into your life, and when something is there all the time, it’s less scary. It’s like a fridge in the kitchen, a sofa in the living room – it’s just there. When you acknowledge it, it doesn’t have to overwhelm you. Grief makes you feel isolated, as if no one understands you or can comprehend the pain you’re in. But I’ve realised that someone near you does know what your heart feels like. That, more than anything, has helped me heal in a way the 15-year-old me never thought possible. We didn’t choose to be here, in the Dead Dad, Mum, Child, Sibling or Dog Club, but here we all are, together. You are not alone.
HEARING THESE PEOPLE’S EXPERIENCES HELPED ME WITH MY OWN GRIEF”