Deserving Grief

5 minute read + 7 minute listen

I remember it was early morning when I learned that she had died. As you do, bleary eyed and still half asleep, I scanned through my phone, waking up to incoming messages, taking the liberty of a quick scroll before meeting the reality of the morning ahead. And there it was, the post from her husband I had always been expecting and yet which caught me by surprise. She had passed away on Midwinter’s day, which I think she would have liked, her being into all that solstice stuff. Every so often she would give a call out within the friends group she’d set up, asking if anyone fancied a tarot card reading. I always did. She had a great interest in the mystical. I guess she’ll have some of the answers to humankind’s biggest questions now.

As you make your way through life, the way in which friendships form shifts slightly. It gets a little trickier, with many people time-starved and perhaps a little less open to making new friendships than they might have been through their teens and twenties. Starting a new friendship in midlife can feel like an investment of sorts. Having the kind of open and honest interactions required to establish a friendship with a level of depth takes the kind of time and effort many will feel they can’t muster. And anyway, aren’t we all too busy to invest in the friendships we already have? Who needs more?

But then, sometimes you just ‘click’. Especially if you’re open to it.

Instagram can be that place of openness. That’s where I encountered this friend, as she waded through life with a husband, three small girls – oh, and a stage four metastatic cancer diagnosis. A social media platform that afforded me a vehicle for connection while I stayed at home with small children has developed into an outlet for creativity, inspiration and meaningful relationships with some great people. It might sound corny, but I do believe that you can find a little tribe on Instagram that will support and laugh along and be incredibly honest with you. It is a portal to community which lots of women benefit from and the closeness and fondness of relationships formed is real.

This friendship was real – and yet, I felt I hadn’t earned the right to grieve her loss. It felt like an indulgence, you see – who was I to feel any pain in her passing? We’d only ever connected online, via typed words, emojis and ‘likes’.

I buried my sadness almost immediately. Life is hard enough – who wants to hear that I’m sad because someone I followed on Instagram had died?

I can’t deny either that there’s a level of voyeurism involved when you’re following someone with a life limiting illness. You genuinely feel terrible for them and what they’re going through. But there can also be this weird sense of indulgence sometimes – like when you tear up at a photo she’s posted of her three girls, all new-shoes and brushed-hair as they pose for another back-to-school-photo she’s grateful to be able to take. On the days she didn’t feel well and spent a lot of time in bed, I could opt out and turn my phone to mute. It can feel messed up to witness pain from a place of comfort, in the fact that another person is in a bad place in comparison to you. It’s that feeling of self-disgust you get from thinking, fleetingly, ‘Okay, I thought I was having a bad day, but at least I’m not dying’. So it felt like shedding tears in front of my husband or on the phone to my sister would have been wrong in the face of her family’s very real loss.

And yet there were real feelings there. Within the intimacy of her friends group, she had shared her husband’s ultimate abandoning of their marriage. Towards the end he told her he didn’t love her any more and couldn’t stand to watch her slowly dying, so he disconnected from her. It broke her heart. They stayed together, of course, pretending they were fine because when one partner is dying of cancer I suppose you allow that to conveniently facilitate the expiration of the relationship. Dying is hard, but divorcing while dying must surely be off the table. So they pressed on. She felt he was depressed, but he didn’t want to fix it. Real friends open up to each other – they tell the truth and I’ll forever be indebted to my friend for her honesty because such open connection is probably our best way of expanding our understanding of life. It’s the true gift of friendship.

Most of our interactions however were the stuff of ordinary life – the stuff that binds us all. Like what films she watched, what restaurant she was excited to eat at, what the weather was like. And so, although it’s digital, there’s this daily interaction that you really miss when it’s gone.

I can’t be sure how we first established our connection – this fellow mother was Canada-based and adored crafting, something I have zero interest in. But those algorithms are powerful things. She also loved nature and reading (my goodness, she could make her way through books) and cooking and felt passionately about many causes. The Instagram universe has a way of matching people up and we were a natural fit. She also had a fascination with Scotland and Ireland, she loved photos of snails on rainy days – she had a blog too, just like me! She influenced me and shared things with me and… now she’s dead.

I’ve never known anyone my age and with such a similar life as mine who has died. This has made her death linger with me as I ask questions of her demise that I’m really asking for myself.

Where does all that creativity go? All those passions? And that huge love she had for her girls? Her energy and emotion and knowledge – where has it all gone? Unanswered questions.

According to an update post from her husband, the epitaph where she has been laid to rest reads ‘pulvis et umbra sumus’. It means ‘we are but dust and shadow’. I found this truly depressing when I read it first. It felt so glib to me. Although I understood I had but a glimpse into this woman’s life, I found it hard to reconcile that such an artistic, curious, vibrant person could wish for such an epitaph. I took it as proof that we weren’t as close as I had thought and that I wasn’t worthy of counting myself as someone who had experienced some kind of ‘loss’.

But then, how well do any of us truly know our friends? It’s a feat to know a romantic partner intimately, never mind your wider circle of family and friends. I suppose, what I’m trying to reason is that all friendships, however conducted, however commenced, however ended, are valid, and the attending emotions are valid. I very much enjoyed the friendship I had with my Instagram friend. I feel her absence and am lucky to have been a witness to the part of her life she shared with me. I grieve her loss.

Rest in peace M, X

Laurie Morrissey, May 2022