738: Good Grief!
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A quick warning, there are curse words that are unbeeper in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. I think when someone dies, when you're grieving, there are things that you expect to feel. But sometimes, greek can come out sideways, take strange forms. I remember, I think the day my son died or the day after, I hit myself in the face. I don't know why I did it, but I gave myself a bloody nose and there was a hospice worker there who'd been helping our family. And she said to my mom, she was like, "Oh yeah, that's normal, don't worry about that." "Oh, we see that all the time." You know, I couldn't believe that my baby had died, and I just punched myself in the nose. This is Rob Bellaney. His son Henry was about to turn three when he died from a brain tumor. And Rob says that the grief that he felt was physical, like physical pain and fatigue and confusion. He forgot the pin for his bank card. He didn't recognize a guy who he worked with all the time. And he said about this publicly, he's a comedian and an actor. He's currently in a TV show that he co-created called Catastrophe. And he talks about his son's death when he's asked, hoping that it might be useful or comforting in some small way to other parents going through this. And it's interesting, when he discusses his son's death, in public, he is pretty even keeled, except when he gets on the subject of how people in his life reacted to Henry's death, how it was hard for some people to acknowledge what had happened. Henry is on a British Top Show. So my wife was pregnant, for example, when Henry died. And there were some people who would find out about that and I have never seen such relief on people's faces. They'd be like, oh, so another big thing. So I don't have to talk about his dead baby. I could talk about his new shiny baby that's coming. And I wanted to kill those people because, I mean, that's not news. It's great. But we all know pregnant people, big whoop, people get pregnant. But my fucking two-year-old, he didn't, a little bit before his third birthday, he died in my home, on my couch. Rob is nice enough to come into the studio to talk to me about all this. He told me he gets it, seeing somebody in pain makes lots of people uncomfortable. They don't know what to say, this sidestep, they avoid. I'm sure in my own life I used to do it in the past too. But if you'd like me to, quote, get over, not the death of my child, but say this wave of emotions that are making you uncomfortable, then the best thing to do would be let them happen and let me feel them and then they'll sort of dissipate organically and then we can carry on with whatever idiotic thing you want to do. You moron insensitive person. The least another person can do in the human family is to bear an ounce of my shipping container ship of pain by accepting that I'm upset, sad, angry, confused. Some people just have a hard time acknowledging death, and that's true when they hear about somebody else's losses, and it's true when it's their loss to face, when somebody goes to them dies.
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