The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - When Mother's Day Becomes Remembrance Day

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

Losing your parents as an adult is a unique experience that sometimes defies explanation. In "I Miss My Mommy," author and illustrator Alison Garwood-Jones presents a cast of characters in various stages of grief - from denial to acceptace. She talks about the nature of this type of loss, why her art helped her through it, and why she wanted to share her insights.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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In loving memory, we will love you forever, Mommy. Love, Chris, Jess, and Beau, the dog. And my caption on this particular drawing says, at some point, it hit Jess. Her deepest feelings had been transcribed by a random employee at a strip mall florist. Alison, thanks for hosting us in your studio today, where we're surrounded by your art. We're here to talk about your book, I Miss My Mommy.

And it's a book of portraits showing adults in various stages of grief due to the loss of their parents. In general, where did the idea for the book come? It bubbled up slowly. I didn't set a goal and say I need to write a book. I lost my dad in 2011 and mom in 2012 and those back-to-back losses I think first of all you're kind of numb but my way of coping with that was I just started to draw for fun because it felt good and so I think after a while I had a series of portraits because I like to do, I like to draw people as opposed to landscapes or other things and I would post most of these drawings on Instagram and after a while I realized, with captions, and after a while I realized that people found

these little psychological portraits interesting. So during COVID I think by then I'd been drawing them for about four years, these various drawings. I thought, I wonder if I have something here that I could shape into something that other people would find helpful. And when you looked around to see what other books were similar or if there actually were any other books that touched on anything that you were thinking during your time of loss. Did you see anything that you really connected with or was this an absolutely new kind of venue for you? I think the first book that I really related to

was Roz Chast's book, Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant, her graphic novel. This was not about parents who'd already gone. This was about parents who were on their way getting older, and Roz realized, I'm going to lose these guys soon. So it was more about anticipatory grief. But I took a lot from her because she writes and draws in a way that doesn't shy away from the uncomfortable topics of life. So I'd say that she was definitely an inspiration. Yeah, I think that was the big one.

And then I think I reached back into my childhood as well, because I've always related to drawings more than I have large swaths of text. And I think that I was influenced by Charles Schultz because he presented a character in Charlie Brown who was really weighted down by the gravity of life. And I thought it was interesting that Charles Schultz chose to show that in a format that you would think is for kids, but really it's for adults and kids.

They can all find something in it. And I know that I found something in it as well. And looking back again at his comics, I'm like, wow, this shows us a lot about handling the vicissitudes of life through this simple comic strip. In your book, you have stagers. Tell us a little bit about what stagers are.

Well, I think most people are very familiar with the five stages of grief, which is something that the celebrated psychiatrist Elizabeth Cooper Ross came up with in, I think it was 68 or 69. So I was aware of that, but I'm not an expert in grief. I'm a participant. Right. So I thought, how do I take that framework that, but I'm not an expert in grief. I'm a participant. So I thought, how do I take that framework that we're all familiar with and turn it into something that's a little more relatable? So I decided to turn the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And I decided to turn those five stages

into a cast of characters that I called the Stagers of Grief. And I thought people could enter into a difficult topic like grief through these portraits of people moving through, not in any linear way necessarily, but moving through these different emotional states. Grief introduces you to storage units. Grief makes you constantly overwhelmed. So you write, after my brothers and I lost my mom and dad

in back-to-back years and crossed the threshold into orphaned adulthood, I saw grief up close. It was intense. I had to look away, but it kept staring back at me, so I offered it my hand. Can you describe to me what you mean by that? The aftermath of grief, like the first stager group that I show is the shell-shocked. And I think when you lose both parents so quickly one after the other you're in a daze for quite some time but it's also very intense right at the very

beginning so I think I was experiencing that intensity but at some point I realized I want to pull back and understand this a little better and this is where light this is where art becomes a life raft. And so that's when I started turning to my sketchbooks and my watercolor palette and trying to match the emotions and the trajectory of emotions I was going through with color and line and splashes of, you know, watery splashes. We've both lost our mothers, and it is a unique kind of grief. My mother died 27 years ago, and it feels like yesterday almost every day. And that's just because that was the closest person to me. That was my person, you know.

And if you feel comfortable, can you tell me a little bit about your mom? My mother, Catherine, Catherine Lucy Garwood-Jones, was part of that generation, born in 28. So she was part of that generation of young women. She was originally from South Africa, but spent a lot of time going back and forth between Cape Town and London through the 1930s and 40s. So she came of age in London, England. At the same time that Princess Margaret and Princess Elizabeth, they're all part of that same generation. So I always thought she kind of looked like her with her pin curls and their little strand of pearls. But anyway, they were very sensible young women and grew up into sensible older women who were very community oriented in

a way that perhaps we aren't so much now because they had to rebuild the landscape around them that had been completely bombed. So as a young woman coming of age, she was a secretary from the time she was 16 working in London for a South African mining company okay and yeah so working from a young age and doing Meals on Wheels I think she was one of the first generations to do Meals on Wheels for people who were you know trying to find a new home because everything was rubble in London at that time. Yeah, and... So pretty hardy. Pretty hardy. Yeah, pretty hardy. But amazingly enough, very attuned to the need to have art in your life. So not so practical that she didn't see the importance and the role of art in managing life

and the twists and turns that you go through. Hence, what I'm doing now is really part of the legacy that my mom and dad gave me, which was you need to do what suits you best. Good luck making a living from it. I'm sure you'll figure it out. But there was no, not one moment did they say that's not a practical choice. Not at all. So this is why I don't have that much angst about

creating art. It's what I've been doing my whole time. So every time I come to this desk, it feels like I'm coming home to them. I have a very strong feeling that had my mother not given birth to me, we would have found each other as friends. And we just would have been great friends for a lot longer. But because she was 40 years older than me, I didn't have enough time with her. And your illustration of your mother kind of harkens that sentiment. So do you want to maybe show it to us and tell us a little bit about that one? Yeah. My mom and I had the same age difference.

She was just shy of 40 when I came along. And so I never thought about our time being limited. But I suppose it was in some ways. But I had the same feeling that we were so in sync. I had a dream. And this is the picture in the book, I had a dream that we were collecting shells on the beach and we were the same age. And I think at some point, I didn't feel like that growing up. I mean, she was a real disciplinarian. I learned boundaries from her that, again, maybe that's part of her generation. You know, they never thought that

kids should be friends with their parents, but that's exactly what we became at a certain point. Friends and colleagues, not colleagues, but confidants. We phoned her every day. And I think this is true for a lot of women who have good relationships with their mothers. You talk to them on the phone every day. So yeah, we definitely would have gravitated to each other if we'd been in school at the same time, you know, so it was a nice thing to have. And I think that that grounding and that friendship gave me a sense of calm that for some reason has lasted till this very day. Because my mom came down with Alzheimer's in 2003, even though she died in 2012, day because my mom came down with Alzheimer's in 2003. Even though she died in 2012, she started to disappear in 2003.

So it's been over 20 years since we had a really good conversation. But that calm at the center of our relationship, I think I'm carrying on. Grief offers some people their first chance to stop running. For others, it's their last chance. Speaking of having good relationships with your mother, not everybody does. And that doesn't, that I guess the psychologists would call complicated grief, where you're still grieving

the way you normally would, only it's just so complex because things are left unsaid, unexpressed. There were problems and issues. And you do have some portraits in your book that kind of speak to that. I wanted this book to show how complicated love is. And because of that, grief becomes complicated so when somebody dies first of all you're dealing with their absence they're no longer here they're

never coming back then you're dealing with their presence because again they are with you in your thoughts your memories yourselves for the rest of life. And not all those memories are good. And I wanted to reflect that in here. Again, I don't have any answers for that because I'm not a psychiatrist, a psychologist, or a grief counselor. But I thought if I can be what I am, which is a journalist and an observer on the sidelines taking notes and scribbling and creating images, maybe I can capture the poignancy of these emotional states that we're in as we move through, you know, and cycle through grief in all kinds of different ways. Yeah, and you did talk in your intro about your generation starting to lose their parents

or who are into, you know, the years of losing their parents. And there's so much that you're not prepared for just in the mechanics of what happens after death. Like, I remember after my mom died going to the funeral home to do all the arrangements. I mean, we kind of did it collectively. None of us wanted to do it by ourselves. And they brought us into a room full of coffins, and we had to choose one. And then, you know, there was a conversation about how much money we should spend on it. And just, I've never felt so much panic in my life as that moment.

You know, you're never going to be prepared for that, no matter what. Yep. And it's true. Nobody gives you a class. This is where the internet can be helpful, though, because there are resources on the internet that can take you through the steps of the admin tasks after the loss of somebody. But yeah, and again, because of the silence around grief, it's something we don't talk about. Right. Right. Yeah. And so, yes, I suppose we could have looked on the internet, but there was no time. I mean, somehow every time is compressed and elongated at the same time. Right. Your sense of time during those first few days and weeks and months is all askew. Like there's nothing you can predict. There's nothing you can count on.

Yep, absolutely. Yeah, this is in the Stager chapter called The Weary. And the caption on this image, and I can just show the image here, the caption is, Shruti avoids social media when living without her parents is too much to bear. So I conducted a survey, and I've yet to publish the results, but I wanted to do some fresh research. I filled out your survey. Thank you so much. It's amazing, you know. Within a couple of days, 40 people had filled out a survey where I asked them to spend at least 12 minutes, 14 minutes of their time

answering 12 short essay questions about how do you feel about Mother's Day now that your mother is gone? And the sentiment that I got back from it was Mother's Day feels like Remembrance Day now. that I got back from it was Mother's Day feels like Remembrance Day now. Once or twice a year, Heidi sits in her car and stares at her childhood home. This is something that I've done. Home is a character in your life story. Same that a city can be a character in your life story. You love Vancouver. I think that's part of your life story. For me, Hamilton is a part of my life story. And so, so much change, happy times, tough times happened in those four walls. And I think

that, again, I wanted my drawings to be things that people could relate to. And I have a suspicion that a lot of people have driven past their old houses and sat there and looked at them and thought about good memories and the time they had that barbecue in the backyard and the time they sat on the front porch and watch life go by. And now somebody else is in that house. And have they changed it? What's still the same? What does my room look like? Looking up at the window that was your room. Like these are all very, very poignant that um just reveal to you the passage of time and your place in it um yeah i've done it during covid we lost to a certain degree the ritual surrounding um death and funerals and things yeah and what you know, obviously, I know you've said it a couple of times, you're not a therapist. You're a participant, and so am I. But I still think that the communal expression of grief is really important. And don't you hope that we get back to that at some point? I do.

You know, it's funny how we've separated death and grief from everyday life. And again, I don't know the exact point when it happened. But you think back to the 19th century and the centuries before that, and maybe even before World War I, I'm guessing. But death, dying, and grief were in the home. Because usually people died in their beds, right? Today they go to a hospital and die there. And that separates us from perhaps the moment of death. We don't get there on time. And it separates us from looking

grief and death in the eye every day. And when it was in the home back in the 19th century, people were moving around it. Maybe the dying person was in the parlor or set up in a room where, you know, there was an interplay between life and kids running around and the dying grandmother. And I think maybe we had a more sophisticated language for it back then. I'd have to check all, again, this is where we can look at all the art and the poems and the literature of the time to think about how they expressed their understanding of grief and their experience of grief. I'm hoping that, again, these various podcasts, these various books that are discussing this taboo topic are going to help us loosen up and start having some hard and intimate conversations about the unpredictability of grief,

the cyclical nature of grief, the aftershocks that keep happening that you would think, aren't I over this yet? And other people might say, why aren't you over this yet? I mean, after a while, it just becomes an old friend, right? Yeah. So I just accept it. I just say, oh, you again.

I know how to deal with you. Right. And it's not active grief anymore after a certain number of years. It's if you've processed it. Yeah. It is remembrance. And it's a kind of grace, too. That's how I've started to look at it, you know. And it's not one emotion. It's kind of an umbrella of emotions. And sometimes it's sad and sometimes it's, okay, well, I'm the person I am today because of the gifts I got from that person. Whoever it is, your mother, your father, anyone you've lost. Right. In those days that you were talking about, the olden days, people wore black bands. Or in my culture, the Italian ladies wore black for a year.

And everyone knew to respect that person. We need something like that, but I don't know what the answer is. Well, this is why I think people are turning to social media. They want to signal to their friends, to their workplace, that my mother just died, and I need you to show me some grace and support. So when I come back to the office, I'm not told, your performance review is tomorrow. These are the deliverables that are due next week. Because when you're grieving, every deadline feels too

aggressive. Even if it's six months from now. Yeah, even if it's six months from now. Everything feels too overwhelming. And I think that we are actively searching for signals that are the black armband or you know the Italian widows black clothing to say that help me through this because I know there's other one other people out there you you've been through this and I'm I'm part of your club I'm part of the community of suffering now how do I get through this you don't get to the other side, right? It becomes like you said, an old friend where you hopefully at some point realize that you've got some coping mechanisms to know how to not be felled by it, but integrated into your being and then turn outwards hopefully and you can be supportive of other people.

I mean, that's the greatest healer, is turning away from yourself and helping other people through not just grief, but any kind of hardship. And finally, tuck this one in your wallet before you head out today. Grief helps us see that life is what we make it. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous philanthropic contributions from viewers like you.