I arrived at the pub early and sent out an email: “I’m the girl in the white shirt and red lipstick!” Not long after that, a young woman, nervous and looking a little lost, appeared and asked: “Are you Rachel?” At first, the conversation was a little stilted, but it began to flow as we got on to common ground.
If this sounds like a blind date, it wasn’t far off – except we weren’t searching for romance, and she wasn’t the only person looking for me. She was, in fact, the first of many to arrive that evening, and what had brought us all together was death, not romance. We were bereaved millennials who had lost someone close and discovered how little grief support exists for people our age.
My search for support groups for young people began at my mother’s suggestion, a few weeks before she died, aged 63, in April last year. I found nothing that resembled what I was looking for. Traditional support groups appeared abundantly available, but when I thought about sitting in a room full of older people who had had their parents for longer – present for life milestones that my mother would never experience – I felt isolated and resentful.
“Millennial grief” is, of course, an imperfect catch-all term; people have always experienced grief in early adulthood, and it can be devastating regardless of your age and generation. But the trend in recent decades has been for women to become mothers later in life, which means that millennials are more likely to have ageing parents than previous generations – and to lose them when they are young.
And, thanks to the political, social and economic instability of the past decade, we are the first generation to be worse off than our parents, and so tend to be emotionally and financially dependent on them for longer. All this uncertainty can make losing a parent even more bewildering.
My mother was a nurse. When I was young, she taught me how to fold my bedsheets into firm, neat hospital corners at the end of my bed. I never expected that I would be using her lesson, at 25, to make her comfortable on the pressure-relief mattress that would soon become her deathbed.
She had been diagnosed with cancer nearly a year before. One evening, my father rang my brother and me and told us to come home immediately; it could be a matter of days. In the end, we had exactly two weeks. In one of the heart-rending conversations we had, days before her death, my mother shook her head and tutted: “I’m disappointed. You should have had me for another 30 years.”
I wondered how I would cope with all that time without her.
At the time of her diagnosis, my life was unstable. I had had a string of entry-level jobs, a failed three-year relationship and was midway through a master’s I hoped would set me on a more solid career path. I still looked to my parents for support to some extent, and that fact made me feel like a failure. Mixed with this lack of direction, my grief led me to conclude, objectively, that the rest of my life wasn’t worth living.
Julia Samuel, author of Grief Works and co-founder of Child Bereavement UK, tells me what is particular about bereavement in emerging adulthood. “The thing about grief is, it throws you into a completely alien landscape,” she says. “So if you feel uncertain already, it heightens that feeling of, ‘I don’t know where I am, I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t even know who I am. My birth certificate says I’m an adult, but I don’t feel like one.’ At 25, you wanted more of your mum to help see you through, to when you could really feel grown up.”
Certainly, the loss of my mother was like losing my North Star. “The death of your mum was a death out of time,” Samuel says. “You felt robbed, but you also felt robbed of a future you felt you and she had a right to. All the images of her you had in your life – at your wedding, the birth of your baby – were lost. So, if you’re in a group of 50-year-old women whose mothers have died, for example, you would think: well, screw you. I don’t know what you’re crying about. You got 30 years more than me.”
When my search for a support group reached a dead end, I decided to write to one of my favourite podcasts, The High Low, the current affairs show hosted by journalists Pandora Sykes and Dolly Alderton. I asked if other listeners had experienced loss and whether they knew of any resources for young people. The episode featuring my letter was broadcast on the day of my mother’s funeral. The next morning, I was forwarded a deluge of responses. The first email read: “When I heard your episode, I nearly crashed my car.” A second: “I burst into tears on the tube. Everything she said completely resonated with me.” I had struck a wellspring of young grief.
If millennial grief is under-supported, then here was a millennial way of filling that gap – using a podcast to connect. In the following days, I read the responses compulsively. Most people reiterated my feeling that there was little out there tailored to our age group, and that many of us felt the same intense isolation. Scrolling through the missives, I felt a sense of release for the first time in over a year. Even more remarkably, I felt the first glimmers of reassurance.
I started meeting those other listeners a month after my mother died. We often talked for hours. Sometimes, I would walk away from a meeting and realise I didn’t even know what the people I’d been with did for a living: we had bypassed small talk and gone straight to the deep and meaningful. Not once do I recall these conversations draining me or exacerbating my pain. Mostly, I felt uplifted and affirmed. I was recognised and I was heard.
Realising the benefit of these meetings, I arranged that first group meet-up in the pub. There, the challenges we were facing as young people became apparent: getting through your first break-up without your mother to comfort you; struggling to assert your need for time off work after your father had taken his life (in one case); having to make funeral arrangements and pay household bills as you grieve. And more: the unexpectedly crap friends, and surprisingly good co-workers; crying at weddings; an unhealthy reliance on drugs, drinking and sex – or (more often) the exact opposite: hedonism that healed, that connected you back to other people, that made you feel your age again. We stayed until last orders, many of us lingering outside afterwards, exchanging numbers.
The next day, I received an email from one of the young women who had attended; her father had died seven years earlier. She nearly hadn’t come, she said, but “it was incredible to meet such strong, courageous people. What I really took away from the evening was that, looking around the room, there wasn’t a tear in sight. It was just a lot of ‘OMG, you, too?’ or ‘I dealt with it like that as well!’”
Since that first meeting, the Grief Network – as I came to name it – has grown. At pubs across London, we often look like a birthday party or someone’s leaving do. Once, a woman asked me if we were a singles event. Another evening, with Fleabag-esque irony, we realised a wake was being held next to us in the pub.
We shall soon be launching a series of events designed to challenge what grieving as a young person looks like. I am talking to people at bereavement charities who have noticed a lack of uptake among young people, about how best to engage this invisible demographic. Other initiatives, such as The Dinner Party or Let’s Talk About Loss, networks aimed at 20-30-year-olds who have experienced loss, are springing up to fill the gaps. The enormous acclaim for Cariad Lloyd’s podcast Griefcast proves that, contrary to what some people believe, those who have been bereaved want to talk about it. Things are changing.
Acknowledging that loss during emerging adulthood is a distinct experience (whichever generation you belong to) is a much-needed conversation within a larger reimagining of how we, as a society, confront – or fail to confront – grief after a death.
I have repeatedly been told that the way I have coped with my mother’s death is courageous, or inspirational. It hasn’t felt that way, though. It felt lonely. It felt needed. I felt forgotten.
Deep down, I don’t want to be brave. I just want my mum back. But in the void left by that impossibility, I can hear the clamouring need to connect. And when you tune in, it can be immensely beautiful – breathtakingly, exquisitely human.
Days before she died, I asked my mother what I would do without her. She looked me in the eye and replied, very calmly, with one word: “Grow.”
Eighteen months on, I would add only one more: “Together.”
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