“There are people that have been edited out of my life and I will never see them again,” actorRichard E Grant said in a recent interview, explaining how some of his friends would cross thestreet to avoid him after his wife Joan Washington’s death in 2021. “If I had done that to them, Iwouldn’t be able to look them in the face.”
It’s an odd thing, when a loved one dies. Although it is you who has suffered monumental lossand is left dealing with the incapacitating reality of never seeing them again, it is oftentimes thepeople around you who behave as if they are most impacted by the event.
I know this, because, like Grant, I lost lifelong friends when my dad passed away in 2016.Seemingly unable to deal with it – or me – they pulled away, migrated to different group chatsand would make decisions for me about whether I was up to socialising or not. “We didn’t thinkyou’d want to come,” they would say, after posting pictures of nights without me out onInstagram.
On the occasions they did speak to me, the conversation was stunted and they wouldawkwardly avert their eyes if I dared mention The Thing. It was like we didn’t even know eachother. Meanwhile, I would dutifully listen to them rant about their boss or the latest guy fromHinge who had just ghosted them.
