Content warning: death. Obviously. Probably should have titled this something different but the Dead Poets Society pun was too good to not use.
A few months after I moved to New York, two of my friends and I were invited to what would later become known as the Dead Parents Brunch.
My old roommate had met a friend of a friend at a party and they had somehow ended up talking about how they had both lost their mothers. The friend of a friend told my roommate that she was having a brunch for people who had lost someone close to them, as a safe space for them to explore their grief. My roommate invited me, and I invited another friend.
I don’t know if it’s the people I’ve made friends with here, or if people just die younger in this country, but I have met six people here who have had either a parent or a boyfriend die on them. In the UK I had the monopoly on grief, but here I was one of many. There was one memorable occasion, the Friday before the dead parents brunch, when I was having drinks with a friend from work. We were discussing our weekend plans, and I told her about the brunch, saying ‘You can’t come, coz none of your parents are dead’.
‘My dad’s dead,’ she replied.
In the UK I could be sure of saying a sentence like that and being met with sympathetic head tilts and noises made somewhere in the throat region. Here, it wasn’t such a safe bet, apparently. Everything in New York is a competition, even trauma.
Don’t get me wrong. I thought at the time, and still think, that this girl’s idea of a safe space for people to discuss grief was a good idea. In theory. I want to make that clear up front.
Maybe it was the execution that turned it into such a farcical anecdote. Maybe it was because the three of us were super hungover, and trekking to Williamsburg to talk about death on a Sunday morning was intensely unappetizing. Or maybe it was just the sheer number of people that were present at this dead people brunch that was so horrifying. We showed up at a (very nice) apartment in Williamsburg to be greeted by around fifteen women who we were all bonded to through our horrible childhood or adolescent or adult experiences with loss. I didn’t know what you were meant to bring to a sad brunch so I brought Prosecco. Why not, I thought. I ended up drinking most of it myself as a coping mechanism for what was to come.
Before we began sharing stories, the host read a grieving manifesto. I don’t remember any of it now, having repressed most of that morning, but again, I think the sentiment was nice. It’s just the kind of thing I would normally laugh at, like a Live Laugh Love sign in someone’s house, except this clearly wasn’t the crowd. After the manifesto, it was just a free-for-all of people talking about the person they had lost. It became clear quite quickly that a lot of people present had either lost the person very, very recently, or had never really talked to anyone about it before. The sheer number of times that the phrase ‘I’ve never told anyone that before’ was said made me sad. Especially since there were clearly so many people who had lost parents in this godforsaken city. My British friends had had to work out how to help me with my own experience with death, because none of them really knew anyone who had such an awful, life-changing loss at our age. Americans are open about weird things and closed about weird things.
My friends and I said very little. We did a lot of nodding and sympathetic-noising. The whole experience was pretty horrifying, mostly because instead of being able to offload some of our own feelings, we were basically forced to take on everyone else’s, listening to gut-wrenching deathbed stories, looking at pictures, head-tilting until our necks hurt. The other people present were falling over each other to tell their stories, and without being reductive, they were all the same. The parent/brother/sister was the most incredible person they had ever met, they were taken too soon, they were their best friend. And while this is a very tempting narrative, it’s not mine, and it wasn’t that of my friends either. And this didn’t seem like an environment that would be amenable to discussing a more complex version of grief.
One of my friends, for example, lost a parent when she was almost too young to have many memories of them. And my other friend, and I, had pretty complicated relationships with our mothers. I’m not saying my mother wasn’t an incredible person, or that I didn’t love her, or that I wouldn’t cut off both my arms to have her back for just five minutes. But that doesn’t mean she was completely without flaws, or that my feelings about her are straightforward. We argued pretty much up until the moment she stopped being able to speak, and then when I was sobbing and saying I wished we hadn’t argued so much, I swear to god she rolled her eyes at me. We were constantly misunderstanding each other. ‘We’re talking at cross-purposes’ was a favorite saying of hers when we were embroiled in yet another argument about skirt length or coming home late or how she loved my sister more than me (she didn’t). I don’t think the movie Ladybird is quite as revolutionary as everyone else does, but I have to say I’ve never seen a more accurate rendering of mine and my mother’s relationship as when they’re in the dress shop trying to find something for Ladybird to wear to prom. Everything the mother says is meant to be nice but comes out as critical, or passive aggressive, or just plain aggressive aggressive, and the daughter takes every opportunity she can to be offended. That was me and my mother.
And beyond our relationship when she was alive, I was pretty pissed at her for dying, too. She chose to stop doing chemotherapy, to ‘give up’, for want of a better expression. And when that didn’t get the job done fast enough, she started looking into Dignitas, a euthanasia clinic in Switzerland. Getting a bill from them after her funeral was a particular highlight of that time, since apparently they charge you for sending them even an inquiring letter. And even when it didn’t come to that, I still have to wrestle with the fact that she had thought about doing it, about voluntarily leaving me and my sister when we were still reeling from my father leaving us for the woman he had been having an affair with for seven years.
Am I pro-euthanasia? Of course. But you can be pro-something all you want until it happens to you, and then see how fucking open minded you are, I dare you. Did I want her to be in pain? Of course not. Did I want to watch her become a shell of herself and not be able to do anything but sit on the couch, just so I could come home every two weeks and tell her all about my life and then leave her alone again? No. But at the same time, she put me on this earth in the first place, and she was choosing to leave me here alone. So yes, I have complicated feelings about her death. And this dead parents brunch, I could tell, was not the place to air them.
We left the brunch (mid-someone else’s sentence, if I recall correctly, having maxed out on trauma dumping) and wandered around Williamsburg in a daze, walking in and out of random shops, picking things up and putting them down again for no discernible reason and with no discernible intent. Every so often our phones would buzz with people texting the group chat, using words like incredible and cathartic and energy and collective.
The one good thing about the pandemic is that it happened about a month after the brunch so we never had to do it again.
One good thing:
This text exchange after a wine party we threw last weekend where people brought some interesting party favours:
One bad thing:
Our apartment has gone from being a freezer to a greenhouse in the space of twelve hours, because apparently there is no middle ground. After texting the super for five days straight with no response, telling him we were literally on the brink of death, seeing our breath in front of our faces, our lives flashing before our eyes, in response he has apparently set fire to the basement, so now it’s like the Bahamas in here. I worked most of Friday without a shirt on because I was sweating so much. What’s that I hear in the distance? Welcome… to New York? Fuck off.