In many cultures around the world, grief is a public spectacle. In Mexico, Día de los Muertos combines remembrance with community celebration. In Japan, families attend carnivals and dance to taiko drums for Obon Festival to honor those who have passed.
In America, however, death is often something to be shouldered in private.
“There is the stigma of grief—the idea, now rampant in American life, of closure,” Cody Delistraty observed in The New Yorker this past year. “Most people are loath to linger in loss.”
“Most” but, thankfully, not all. Letting grief linger is an experience that even beloved actor Andrew Garfield bears proudly.
In 2021, Garfield appeared on “Late Night” television, telling jokes and promoting the film “Tick, Tick... Boom!” — when host Stephen Colbert asked about his mother, who had passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2019.
“I’m sorry for your family's loss,” Colbert said gently. “And I’m wondering how doing this show, or any show… how art itself helps you deal with grief.”
“Yeah,” Garfield said, already appearing to choke up a little. “I love talking about it, by the way, so if I cry, it’s only a beautiful thing. This is all the unexpressed love, right, the grief that will remain with us, you know, until we pass — because we never get enough time with each other right?”
“No matter if someone lives till 60, 15, or 99,” he added. “So I hope this grief stays with me.”
And it has.
Three years have passed since that “Late Night” conversation, and Garfield has remained open about the grief of losing his mother.
In October 2024, Garfield visited the set of “Sesame Street” and sat on the stoop with Elmo, who asked how he was doing. Garfield said he was thinking of his mom.
“I’m happy to have all the memories of my mum, and the joy she brought me, and the joy she brought my brother, and my dad, and everyone she ever met, everyone around her,” the actor told Elmo. “So, when I miss her I remember it’s because she made me so happy. So I can celebrate her, and I can miss her at the same time.”
“Elmo really loves that, Andrew,” the muppet replied, promising to think about Garfield’s mother too.
“Elmo really listens really well,” Garfield said with a soft smile.
It’s not just actors and adorable puppets who help us navigate grief. In Washington, D.C. policy expert Joyal Mulheron has been working for years to revolutionize the way we talk about grief.
In 2010, she lost her infant daughter Eleonora at only 5 months old. At first, it felt impossible to shower or even feed herself. Each morning, all she could think about was taking care of her two older children, who were both in elementary school.
Time passed, and slowly, her relationship with grief evolved from an explosive bomb to a daily weight in her chest. Her mind lingered on grief — of course with her own loss — but also with the weight that people carry every day around the world.
“When I step back to look at the data around bereavement, and the implications of losing a loved one, I find it stunning and incredibly worrisome,” Mulheron told WPSU.
For Mulheron, bereavement is an “invisible public health crisis.”
“Because it is not just the family themselves, now that is at risk of poor health, social or economic outcomes,” she continued, explaining how it’s about “shifting the paradigm so that we're able to put a system of support around them so that we don't have so many negative outcomes for these individuals or communities.”
On average, 35% of employers offer 1 to 3 days of bereavement leave. Another 45% offer 4 to 5 days. Often, that’s not even enough time to plan and attend a funeral.
In an episode of PBS’ “Brief But Spectacular,” Mulheron said that grief is not something you simply live with. It’s something that can drastically derail the trajectory of peoples’ lives, especially at a young age — and especially in low-income communities.
“There are stunning statistics around areas of concern that keep me up at night,” she told PBS. “One of those is that as many as 80 to 90% of incarcerated youth experienced a death event just prior to being incarcerated. We are incarcerating grieving children in America.”
In the last decade, Mulheron founded the nonprofit Evermore to lead a radical mental health initiative, one that involves annual trips to Capitol Hill and bipartisan attempts to unite the country under a shared experience: grief.
“The first thing that I would say to people, you're not alone,” Mulheron said. “You and your person that you lost, they matter. They matter terrifically.”
In addition to advocating for people in prison, Mulheron has brought bereavement advocacy to colleges and workplaces across the country, taking a grassroots approach to changing the national attitude towards grief and lengthening the standard periods of bereavement leave.
Mulheron is not alone. Meredith Wilson Parfet is the CEO of Ravenyard Group, a crisis management firm, and she wants to reshape the way Americans approach tragedy, too. In workplaces across the country, she constantly sees people struggle to balance life and work in the aftermath of loss.
“What happens when you have to go back to the office after the death of a loved one? Or in the middle of a divorce?” Parfet posed in a TED Talk. “Our brains don’t know the difference between grief at work, and grief at home — it’s all grief. All of it.”
Parfet speaks from experience. When she was younger, attending college as a graduate student, Parfet received earth-shattering news: her 23-year-old sister had died from an accidental overdose.
After that loss, Parfet took on a new fascination with death. She read the “Bardo Thodol” — also known as the Tibetan Book of the Dead. She tried grief yoga. She wrote her own obituary. It was during that chapter of her life that she became a death doula and a hospice chaplain.
Death doulas — as recently popularized on “The Pitt” by the night shift charge nurse Lena Handzo — provide emotional, physical, and spiritual support to people and their families at the end of their lives.
“When I first started with hospice, I started as a volunteer, and that was a week of training and then sitting with the dying and ‘companioning’ them,” Parfet told Good Good Good.
The hospice work involved a lot of cleaning houses and reading aloud to patients as they lay in bed. Others simply needed someone to sit beside them as they passed.
While she was enrolled in the death doula program at the University of Vermont's Medical School, Parfet was able to tackle the harder, existential questions surrounding death.
“How do you work with grief?” she recalled asking herself. “How do you sit with someone who's dying and show up for them and think about not just religious questions or spiritual questions, but just — what does it mean to be human?”
Over time, Parfet began to believe that grieving is human, and it’s something that unites all of us. And Parfet doesn’t limit the definition of grief to the death of a person. For her, grief comes in many forms: in the loss of a marriage, a career, or a home.
“You had a whole series of beliefs or an understanding of what your life was like, and then something happens, and it's never the same again,” Parfet explained. “That’s the core quality of grief, I think we all feel it as humans — that wanting it to be like it was, and it's not. Those feelings of loss, disorientation: ‘I was this, and now I don't know who I'm going to become.’ I think there's commonality there.”
On a given day, Parfet says someone may experience all of the stages of grief, and all of the forms of mourning, all at once. Other days, it may be hard to feel anything at all.
“I think the key question that I always ask about grief for myself is, what are we supposed to learn from it?” Parfet asked. “What are we supposed to do with it? What does it mean? Why does it happen? And that the entire process of my adult life has been asking those kinds of questions about grief.”
The loss of her loved ones, coupled with her experience as a hospice chaplain and death doula, has greatly informed the way Parfet approaches grief today.
Through talking about grief, advocating for better bereavement care, and helping others process their pain, we can build a better world to grieve in, and that starts with being more realistic with each other — and ourselves.
“We praise people, especially at work, for how tough they are… and yet grief is not that,” Parfet said. “It's not about toughness. You don't tough your way through grief. It’s about compassion.”
The Do’s and Don’t’s of Grief
Here are a few pieces of advice Meredith Wilson Parfet offered Good Good Good readers when it came to comforting loved ones who are grieving.
Step 1) Show up for them
“Don't just show up the day-of with a casserole, but show up six weeks later when things get quiet, six months later when people's lives are moving on,” Parfet noted.
“We like to think that grief goes in this tidy one-year package… But everyone I know who's faced catastrophic grief — for many of us — it's the rest of our lives of grief, and it's certainly much longer than just the first year.”
Step 2) Keep reaching out
Keep a lifeline open, even if it’s just in the form of a text message. But Parfet advised staying away from questions like “How are you feeling?” and “How are you doing?”
“Grief is really, really sh—y. Nobody's doing great,” Parfet said plainly. “Instead ask: ‘What things are coming up for you? How does it feel today? Is it heavy?’”
Step 3) Let them know there are no expectations
For Parfet, a brief check-in goes a long way; especially when it’s coupled with a particular footnote.
“If you're going to text someone who's in the middle of a grief process, say: ‘no need to reply back.’” Parfet advised. “So there’s no burden of them having to give anything back to you.”
Step 4) Don’t let fear of saying the wrong thing keep you from saying anything
Unfortunately, Parfet said, some people pull away from grieving friends and family members out of fear that they’ll say something wrong.
“That fear that we have that we’ll upset someone is pretty misguided,” she said. “It's generally rooted in our own fear that we will be upset.”
Step 5) Keep their loved one’s memory alive
In Parfet’s opinion, even just mentioning the name of the person who passed can hold a lot of power.
“Many grievers love to say the name of the person they've lost,” Parfet explained. “Because it's like once they die, it becomes this quiet thing that people are afraid to say the wrong thing, so they say nothing.”
Step 6) Know that it’s not about you
“If you've been through something super hard yourself, it's not a coprocessing exercise where you're there to tell them all of your grief stories so that they can hear it,” she said, advising readers to give grievers your full attention.
“A friend of mine and I call it ‘flashing your passport,’” Parfet said. “If there's a griever, I will say something to the effect of ‘I've had a lot of losses’… And then stop — because it's not my time to tell my story.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the 2025 Mental Health Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image via Warrick Page/HBO Max
