‘I felt I had no right to grieve’: what happens if your sorrow doesn’t seem appropriate?

When I was 17, a girl in my year died suddenly, in her sleep. Natalie was beautiful and very popular. We weren’t friends and we hadn’t really spoken to each other much. (I was a self-conscious, self-obsessed teenager and I assumed I was invisible to most of my classmates.) At the time, her death seemed like a matter for the other popular girls. Because I was self-obsessed, I was worried about being accused of using a tragedy to gain traction and social status. I didn’t try to comfort her friends. I didn’t understand that we were going through a collective, communal grief. My shock and sadness seemed fraudulent and I believed the best gift I could give anyone was space. Natalie’s very best friends were allowed to cry in the corridor and take time off school. If I tried it, I’d be attention-seeking, claiming emotions I had no right to feel.

Now that I’m 39, I regret everything I did and didn’t do. I wish I’d put my self-consciousness aside and let empathy lead the way. I could have gone to her friends and asked what they needed. I could have taken the time to get to know their version of Natalie, who probably wasn’t a remote goddess to them, but a sweet, funny teenage girl.

It’s taken me more than 20 years to understand that grief isn’t an emotion we need to earn. During that time I learned about “disenfranchised grief” – a term coined by bereavement expert Kenneth Doka in 1989. He explained that it “refers to a loss that’s not openly acknowledged, socially mourned or publicly supported”. Even when we feel that we can openly claim our grief, it’s heavy and hard to navigate. When we don’t think we have a right to our sadness, it’s impossible to heal.

It brought two friends to the forefront of my mind – John and Andrea. Their deaths were just over a year apart. They hadn’t been my closest friends. There were other people in their lives who had a much greater claim to grief than me. But I thought about them both constantly. I missed them. I felt angry and guilty and ashamed that I hadn’t been a better friend. I resented the other friends, whose grief seemed more legitimate than mine – and I hated myself for that. I had to remind myself that my feelings were shaped by love. When I tried to push my grief away, I pushed my happy memories away, too. I wanted the chance to remember the best of my friends, and the times when I’d felt close to them.

The night I met John was especially memorable, because we both thought I’d die first.

We went to a screening of a film. At the time, he was the editor-in-chief of a film website, which sounded very grand – later I learned that he was also the staff writer, the entire picture desk staff and occasionally the office cleaner. John was charming on Twitter – warm, generous, wicked and fun. Over pizza and drinks, I discovered that he was just the same in real life. Imagine a third Mitchell brother, played by Noël Coward. That was John.

As we wobbled in the general direction of Charing Cross, towards home, I asked “What are all those people doing on Nelson’s Column?”

John turned towards me. “You’ve never been up Nelson’s Column? How long have you lived in London? We must remedy this at once!”

I climbed up on to the plinth as gracefully as I could (not very) and marvelled at seeing London from a slightly higher vantage point than usual. I think John offered me his hand on the way down. I think I said, “Don’t worry, I’m fine.” I know exactly what happened next. I missed my step.

My memories are blurry, here, because I lost consciousness, but he came to the hospital with me. I can recall giggling as I used a bedpan behind a translucent curtain, while John turned his back and hummed a little tune to help me to preserve my dignity. I can picture the two of us, alone in a little room, watching the sky turn from navy to pink. Dawn was breaking, and I was out of danger. “I really thought you were going to die,” he whispered. His face was very pale. I smiled. “But I didn’t! And now we have a story! We’ll remember this for ever!”

I believed the incident marked the start of an important friendship. We’d be in each other’s lives for years to come, dining out on this ridiculous anecdote. But when John died, in hospital, six years later, I found out about his death on Twitter.

If I could go back to the moment when we met and give my past self a single piece of advice, it wouldn’t be, “Don’t go up Nelson’s Column,” or even, “Really watch your step on the way down.” It would be: “This friendship is precious. Fight for it. Don’t take it for granted, and don’t let it ebb away.” We’d fallen into an easy, instant intimacy. Soon, we became part of a gang, made up of other Twitter friends who had made the leap into “real life”.

John had been diagnosed with blood cancer in the summer of 2015. The shock was searing, but galvanising. Shortly after his diagnosis, John had a birthday dinner. “Good to know that cancer will get everyone out in the middle of the week,” he joked. “I hope no one is going to leave after two drinks, pleading a morning meeting, under the circumstances.” We made plans to rally round, and talked about rotas, routines, freezer filling. We made jokes about Peter’s Friends and said that in 20 years, we’d return to the restaurant and say, “Remember when John nearly died?” Champagne all round.

A year later, John was still in and out of hospital, but he seemed to be responding to treatment. I left London and moved to the Kent coast, and my connection with our wider friendship group started to unravel. They seemed much closer to John than I was. I had always found the group difficult to navigate. It was easy for me to convince myself that the other members didn’t like me at all. Anxiety and depression descended, periodically. I nursed a secret suspicion that I had always been a non-player character, and the main characters were glad to get rid of me. Now, I’m ashamed that I let those feelings get in the way of a friendship I should have protected.

When I found out that John died, I was barely in touch with any of our mutual friends. How had I let myself lose him? What was the appropriate amount of grief to feel, when you’ve loved someone very much – but you’ve barely spoken to them during the last year of their life? My grief felt wrong. It had the wide, shallow bloom of a bruise. I’d loved John, but had I meant anything to him? The emotions that rose in my throat seemed monstrous, so I swallowed them down again. I felt lonely, angry and selfish. This wasn’t about me. It couldn’t be about me. I’d forfeited the right to my big feelings, by failing to protect the friendship. I was more mad than sad and it scared me. I focused on trying to feel less and making myself as numb as possible. Better to have no feelings, than the wrong feelings.

A year later, in the spring of 2019, my friend Andrea was diagnosed with a rare liver disorder. I knew Andrea through the Jilly Cooper book club, a gang of women who had bonded over a shared love of bonkbusters. Within minutes of Andrea’s awful announcement, the rallying round began. I had a spooky sense of déjà vu as we shared visiting schedules, made reading lists, and Monzo’d each other fivers for care packages. Andrea had known some of the other Jillies for ages, but the two of us had never spent any time alone together. After her diagnosis, we started to message each other frequently.

Andrea wanted to make plans. We talked about what would happen when she was out of hospital, when she was better, when summer came, when, when, when. It was peony season and we discussed where to acquire peonies, where to put them, their scent, their colour and how to prolong their lives. When I first met Andrea, I’d have guessed she’d like lilies or orchids. She seemed elegant, delicate and controlled. When we spoke about peonies, it was as though we were speaking about her second self, her moon sign – a craving for the pungent, riotous and intense.

I hadn’t learned my lesson. As Andrea’s condition improved, I assumed she’d make a stunning recovery, build a brand-new wing of the hospital and be given an OBE for services to grace under pressure. When my friend Kat called me early one sunny morning, I knew, before I slid my finger across the phone screen, that we’d lost her.

As I started to make sense of the situation, the awful old feelings rose up. I had less right to be there than anyone. I hadn’t played enough of a role in Andrea’s life to grieve her. If I was going to earn my place among my friends, I had to offer comfort and support. But I didn’t know what to say, or where to reach. I wondered whether this loss would help me make some sense of losing John and bring me some wisdom and perspective. Instead, it made that grief seem even heavier.

Grief wasn’t supposed to feel this way. I waited for a slow, profound heaviness to take root. Instead, I felt wild. Angry, lonely, abandoned. And selfish. I had no right to these feelings. I couldn’t tell anyone about them. Emotionally, I was at the very end of the queue.

I couldn’t numb myself this time. The dam had burst. I shut myself off and marinated in shame and pity, feeling exactly like a child having a temper tantrum. When I cried, I didn’t sob sweetly into a handkerchief, thinking beautiful thoughts about my lost friends. I screamed. Sometimes I’d lie face down on my bed, grunting into a pillow, kicking the mattress as hard as I could. Please, I thought, someone, give me grace and strength, make me useful. Please let me burn through these mad feelings, so I can get to the proper ones.

The screaming helped, a little. Reading helped even more. I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Cariad Lloyd’s You Are Not Alone, which were deeply comforting. Books saw my “wrong” feelings and held them and absorbed them, without judging me. And then, in the spring of 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic began and death and grief were everywhere.

The observations made by creative people struck me. People talked about feeling heartbroken, because their first novel was being published when bookshops were closed, or being unable to perform in the plays they’d been rehearsing for months – and then feeling guilty and ashamed of those feelings, because people were dying. Others talked about struggling to process the death of loved ones when they hadn’t been able to spend any time with them at the end. Or about how wrong it felt to go to a funeral on Zoom. A friend’s cat died and she struggled to contextualise her grief. “I don’t really know who to talk to, or turn to,” she said. “Everyone is suffering and struggling. I’m not sure where my feelings fit in; there doesn’t seem to be space for them on the scale.”

It was liberating to learn that for most of us, grief isn’t just about death – we can grieve relationships, lost opportunities and endings. Everyone seemed to be experiencing disenfranchised grief, struggling to attach heavy, oversized feelings to losses that didn’t seem strong enough to bear their weight. We felt isolated – scared to open up about the scale of our emotions. But we were isolated together. A wall fell away. I started to talk about missing John and Andrea. I started to realise that I was allowed to miss them. Grief wasn’t proof of the impact I’d had in John’s life, or Andrea’s – it was proof of the love they’d brought to mine.

In a tribute to her partner and collaborator Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson wrote: “I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.” Love is a lot like grief. It’s rarely pure, sweet and easy. It can be heavy and painful. It can rush in like a tide, buoying us up, and knocking us down. It doesn’t have a sense of proportion. We don’t love in direct correlation to the amount we are loved. If I was more guarded with my love, maybe I’d have a more straightforward relationship with my grief. But I’m lucky in love – it fills my life. I have a lot of feelings for a lot of people and I’ve learned that there is as much wonder in loving as there is in being loved. Inevitably, this will lead to grief, concentric circles of it lapping my heart. And it will never be dignified or appropriate. It will be vast and wild, the same size as the cast of people who make my life brighter.

Pity Party by Daisy Buchanan is published by Sphere at £14.99. Buy it for £13.19 from guardianbookshop.com