Grief club
For many people, grief is private – and shameful. Two young women want to bring it out of the shadows,
Dusk was falling when Julia Craig arrived at the Devonport Folk Music Club on Auckland’s North Shore. It was a warm spring evening, perfect for a beer with mates. There was a band playing – a folk act with a double bass, a banjo and a smooth cover of Adele’s Rolling in the Deep. The music drowned out the noise in Julia’s head. Just hours earlier, she stood over her dad’s coffin.
‘‘At 23 years old, I was the first person in my friend group to lose a parent,’’ she says. ‘‘After the funeral, I was so overwhelmed, and I needed to escape. My friends thought it was odd that I wanted to go to a gig. But my dad’s death was earth-shattering, and I was desperate to feel normal again.’’
A year-and-a-half earlier, Julia’s father, Colin, became ‘‘moody and erratic’’. While riding to work on his motorbike, he would clip the wing mirrors of parked cars. At first, doctors thought he was suffering from stress. His brain was hiding a tumour.
‘‘Mum said, ‘It’s called glioblastoma. Please don’t look it up,’’’ Julia recalls. ‘‘Of course I looked it up, and it was terminal. So there was no hope. Nothing to fight for. I just had to watch my dad die. I started grieving on the day he was diagnosed.’’
When a loved one is dying, families try to make memories together: going on road trips, working through a bucket list and having rich conversations. But Colin quickly developed dementia-like symptoms and lost his short-term memory. Most of the time, he didn’t understand that he had cancer.
When Julia played music by Talking Heads, Colin would light up. Most of the day, however, he sat on the couch ‘‘staring into space’’ or sleeping. Julia took Colin for walks, but he was ‘‘unco-ordinated and bewildered’’, so the outings were stressful.
‘‘It’s shameful to admit, but I was bitter and resentful towards my dad because he was ill and couldn’t look after himself. It’s so frustrating to see a parent figure – the strong person you once went to for help – become like a child. I had switched roles with him, and I felt trapped.
‘‘I saw my friends on weekends. I’d go to someone’s house and sit there with my arms folded – a ball of anger. They would talk to me, and I’d snap back. I was so mad that people weren’t asking enough questions and weren’t saying the right things. But none of them could relate to what I was going through, so they didn’t know what to do.’’
After 17 months, Colin died in his sleep. There was no sense of closure for Julia – just ‘‘sadness and relief’’. One hundred bouquets of flowers arrived at the family home and gave Julia’s mum hayfever. But after the funeral, there was silence. Some relatives stopped talking about Colin altogether, as if he never existed.
Julia developed anxiety and began to have panic attacks. She quit her job, used food as a source of comfort and isolated herself from people, believing she was ‘‘no fun any more’’.
‘‘I was alarmed, because my grief was so different to what I had seen in pop culture – that Disney kind of grief, where there’s something noble and brave in it. In movies, there’s joy in this beautiful remembrance of the person who is gone. But my grief was ugly. It was messy, embarrassing and undignified. I thought something was wrong with me.’’
Julia couldn’t afford therapy. Her GP secured four free counselling sessions, which made a ‘‘huge difference’’, but there was no funding for extra sessions. An antidepressant, however, was funded. Julia took it for a year-and-a-half. She still hadn’t processed her loss.
‘‘In other cultures, grief is shared. But in Western culture, it’s private. There’s a colonial post-war mindset: ‘This is awful, so let’s not talk about it.’ I felt like I wasn’t being very brave, and that I needed to have a stiff upper lip and grieve quietly. My friends thought I wanted to be left alone. That’s the last thing I wanted.’’
Our modern understanding of grief has been heavily influenced by the work of Swiss-American psychologist Elizabeth KublerRoss. In 1969, she wrote a book outlining five ‘‘stages’’ of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
These days, mental health experts are at pains to emphasise that Kubler-Ross’s list is not exhaustive, and each person’s grief journey is unique and unpredictable. But 27-year-old Jodie Botica reckons most of us expect grief to unfold in a neat, linear fashion.
‘‘We think people need only five days of bereavement leave before returning to work and carrying on with life,’’ she says. ‘‘After a year, you graduate from grief. You’re handed a certificate and it’s like, ‘OK, that’s done now.’ But it has been four years since my mum died, and I’m still grieving.’’
Jodie and her mother, Karin, were more like best friends than mother and daughter. They went op-shopping together and upcycled old furniture and clothes. Coffee dates and runs were weekly fixtures.
‘‘When you’re young, you don’t think about your parents’ mortality,’’ Jodie says. ‘‘I assumed my mum and dad would die after long, happy lives – after we had done many more great things together.’’
In 2016, Jodie had just finished university and was enjoying her first job in marketing when her mum became ill. Karin had an aggressive, terminal form of blood cancer.
While she went through chemotherapy and radiation, Karin instructed her 23-yearold daughter to keep living her best life. Jodie reluctantly went to Japan on a preplanned holiday. When she returned to Auckland, she discovered that her mum was ready to go.
‘‘I was astounded at how much she had declined while I was away. She was in a lot of pain and couldn’t really talk, because the cancer had spread to her face. She said, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t do this any more. You have been the best daughter. Stay strong and smile.’ Those were her last words to me.’’
Jodie and her dad held a small, casual service in their backyard. The garden was Karin’s pride and joy. The guests wore colourful clothes and drank margaritas – Karin’s favourite drink.
Jodie’s friends invited her for coffees and walks, and sent her copious amounts of lasagne. After a few weeks, those catch-ups dropped off and she was left to ruminate on her loss. While her friends were talking about parties and gigs, Jodie worried about
whether her dad could keep paying the mortgage.
‘‘When you lose a parent, there’s a distinct ‘before’ and ‘after’. The world, as I knew it, was changed forever. Mum will never meet the man I will marry. She’ll never meet her grandchildren. And I’ll never find out who I could have become if she was still in my life.
‘‘Dad and I would get into massive screaming fits. He was like, ‘I’ve lost my wife!’ I’d shout, ‘Well, I’ve lost my mum!’ We were playing the grief Olympics. It took a while to realise that we couldn’t compare our grief. We had to stop competing and try to help each other through it.’’
Jodie struggled to sleep, and often dreamed about her mum. Her GP offered medication, but she refused it because she wanted to process her grief rather than ‘‘slapping a Band-Aid over it’’. Counselling helped, but she still felt empty and alone.
‘‘We live in a grief-illiterate society. People keep you at arm’s length when you’re going through it. It’s almost like they think it’s contagious. I really needed to talk to someone around my age who was going through the same thing.’’
Jodie and Julia studied art history at Auckland University, but they met for the first time in Venice in 2015. Both women had landed internships at an art museum on the Grand Canal.
It was ‘‘three months of hedonism’’, Jodie laughs – drinking, Instagramming and admiring beautiful art. After returning to New Zealand, they lost contact.
Julia picks up the story: ‘‘Two years later, I was working on the front desk at The Pah Homestead and Jodie walked in. She was like, ‘How have you been?’ I said, ‘Well, actually, my dad just died.’ She said, ‘My mum just died.’ It was this crazy, beautiful moment.’’
Both had broken up with their boyfriends and were trying to build new lives. They moved into a flat together and began unpacking their grief. Flatmates and workmates often joined those conversations. Almost by accident, they had started a grief club – or a ‘‘dead parents club’’, Julia jokes.
‘‘We would meet up at [the food court] Ponsonby Central,’’ says Jodie. ‘‘The people around us were on dates, and there we were, talking about losing our parents. I remember walking home after those meetings with the biggest smile on my face.’’
Jodie and Julia have recently launched Wish You Were Here, a movement aiming to connect young adults who have experienced grief, and give them a safe space to talk about it. (‘‘Like, how do you tell a guy you just met on Tinder that your mum’s dead?’’ says Jodie.) They’re building a website and Instagram page with stories and resources.
‘‘I’m an atheist, but when my dad died, I felt spiritually alone,’’ says Julia. ‘‘It doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t need to feel guilty or ashamed. The main thing is to avoid isolating yourself.’’
Recently, they held their first in-person meet-up in a Wellington bar, and plan to host more events and activities this year. Jodie and Julia also want to educate people about how to support those who are grieving.
‘‘Don’t wait for someone to ask for help,’’ says Jodie. ‘‘Just turn up with dinner or groceries. Offer to walk their dog. Keep checking in, even if they fob you off, or it seems like they’re doing well. Write down dates like birthdays and death anniversaries. Ask permission to talk about the person who died, and keep talking about them.
‘‘Don’t sugarcoat it. My mum didn’t ‘pass away’. She died. She didn’t ‘lose her battle with cancer’. That suggests she’s a loser. The cancer killed her – it wasn’t for a lack of strength or grit. When we talk about death, we need to keep it real.’’
Four years after Julia’s dad died, the clouds in her life have begun to part. She bought an apartment in Auckland and is in a ‘‘great relationship’’. She stays close to her dad by listening to his music – David Bowie and Leonard Cohen – and volunteering. That was important to Colin.
‘‘Before Dad got sick, I was cynical about people getting tattoos for dead people,’’ Julia says. ‘‘I was like, ‘Why would you do that? It’s attention-seeking.’ Then Dad died, and I’m like, ‘Oh, I get it now.’ Dad had one green eye and one blue eye, and he said that he gave me his green eye. So I got a little tattoo of that.’’
Jodie is engaged and has bought a place in Wellington – a 1960s house that her mum would have loved to do up. She works in the fundraising team for a hospice. By supporting people at the end of their lives, Jodie feels connected to Karin.
‘‘I used to view Mum’s absence as a puzzle to be solved or a problem to be fixed. But now I see grief as a mystery I must honour and grow with.
‘‘I often get worked up, trying to find tangible evidence that she was part of my life. I wish we took more photos together and that I still had bits of her handwriting. I wish I could remember what her voice sounds like. But I also see parts of her in me – like her kindness and optimism. And now that I’m 28, I notice little lines in my brow, just like she had. I say, ‘Oh, hey Mum.’’’