Brooke Boney: ‘The most painful part of grief is having to hold it on your own’

It’s like receiving some amazing news, then going to pick up the phone to call someone who is no longer there. Or seeing a car and thinking they’re driving. My good friend and incredible writer, Dave Le’aupepe, said it best in a recent song about his father: “I still see you in everything.”

All of us, if we’re lucky, will outlive our parents. We will change jobs, lose contact with friends and move cities – if we live our lives to the fullest. So why then don’t we know how to cope when these things inevitably happen?

BROOKE BONEY

In a way, that’s what we’ve been experiencing collectively during the pandemic. These lives we had and knew and loved have been changed in ways we don’t fully comprehend and, cruelly, the more freedom we get, the more we come to realise what has changed and just how much we’ve all changed. And none of us asked for this. It might be why some people are struggling more now than when we were locked down.

In other cultures, there are processes for mourning that help ease the burden of grieving alone. In some traditional Aboriginal ceremonies still practised around the country (in which I am by no means an expert), they paint themselves so their dead can’t recognise them and can pass more peacefully into the next life. You’re also no longer allowed to say their name, so they can rest more peacefully.

In eastern Australia, practices are different. Family members drive long distances from all around to hold each other in their grief. There’s no formal or traditional aspect of it. I can remember, though, from a very young age the guttural sobs as loved ones were lowered into the ground.

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I was at a funeral recently, and I thought about what purpose it served. Hundreds of family members standing there in the pouring rain and wind listening to the wailing. Maybe there’s not much more to it than that. We’re there to witness their grief and help them hold the unbearable weight of their pain. To let them allow their grief go somewhere.

Maybe the most painful part of grief is having to hold it on your own. If love is something you do with others, maybe grief should be as well. I still have the dog harness. I just moved it from the car to a drawer upstairs.

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