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This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, yuk language's yum.
This episode is about death. Content warning: death. And mentions of cancer, and Parkinson’s, and there are several swears of category B - and one category A swear. But it’s a very jaunty episode overall, I think, don’t you worry.
On with the show.
HZ: My dad died four months ago. I was working on the episodes about the name Fiona at the side of his deathbed, and in between part 1 and part 2, he died. And when people ask me about him and I say that he’s dead or he has died, it feels like I’m almost being confrontational just stating the facts, even though it is correct - he did die, I saw him do it.
HZ: Do you find that other people are uncomfortable using the word 'death'? Because there's a lot of euphemisms around.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah. And it's frustrating. It's really frustrating. And it's something that those of us in the death industry are trying to campaign against.
HZ: You're also an assassin.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yes! Oh yeah. I kill people and then I'm there for the grief.
HZ: The full package.
CARIAD LLOYD: I'm Cariad Lloyd. I'm a writer and improviser, actor, broadcaster, I am the host of the Griefcast podcast, uh, where I interview people about their experiences of grief and death, and my new book is called You Are Not Alone, and it is everything I have learnt from the past seven years, nearly 200 episodes, of talking to people about grief and death and my own experience, which is that my dad died when I was 15 of pancreatic cancer. And so I have been on a very long grief journey, and spent, I guess you could say like set the past seven years, like a deep dive into like what grief is, what it means, how it affects us all. So yeah, we have all these euphemisms like passed away, gone to a better place, lost. I You've lost someone, you know, I lost my father at 15.
HZ: Careless.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah, yeah. And I use the D word, you know, I say "he died" and "he's dead". And that took a lot of therapy to be able to do that. So I, I understand why it's tricky for some people, but the big thing is a lot of this language comes about from protecting people, and also especially children. And there's a lot of research to show it's actually worse. So if you don't use the word 'died' with a child, it can cause a lot of anxiety. For example, if you say they've gone to sleep, then a child will be afraid to go to sleep. If you say they've gone to a better place, a child might start looking for them, thinking, "well, where is this great place? I want to go too." So it can cause a lot of problems with kids. And I think we all can get our head around that, but we sort of discount ourselves in that, and as adults it can cause a lot of problems if you're not using the word, because somewhere in your brain is a part of you that's like, "Oh, they're not dead, really." Which is a pretty common grief reaction. Even 20 years on, there's a bit of me that's like, "Yeah, but is he? Yeah, but is he dead?" There's 0.1% of my brain that if the front door knocked and it was him, I'd be like, “I knew it! I knew it! I knew he wasn’t dead.” Use the death word, guys. It's gonna be much better if we all start using it.
EVIE KING: I mean, if I was to google synonyms of ‘dead’ - let's try that. Synonyms, ‘dead’. See what comes up. ‘Deceased.’
HZ: Deceased is just Latin for death.
EVIE KING: ‘Late’, ‘lost’, ‘lamented’...
HZ: ‘Lamented’!
EVIE KING: ‘Expired’ - expired! Like a cheese. ‘Departed’. ‘Gone’. ‘No more. ‘Fallen. ‘Slain’. Now you're starting to infer causes of death. ‘Slaughtered’, ‘killed’ - see, it escalates quickly. There’s not much, there's not much is there?
HZ: Which is odd considering how much death there is everywhere for everyone.
EVIE KING: Yeah, you get more, more synonyms for very boring words, don't you, very workaday words. I think basically maybe it comes down to the fact that dead is dead and we all know what that means, universally dead is dead, and there's no getting away from it, there's no escaping it and there's no getting around it. So we just have to face that word and use it. And if we don't feel like saying dead, we'll just go “passed away”.
HZ: Maybe that's the thing: maybe we don't need new vocabulary yet until we've learnt to get comfortable with ‘dead’.
EVIE KING: And then we can start really jazzing it up. Creating fun terms! Like, you know, when you get things like ‘bottomless brunch’ - that kind of thing for ‘dead’. I think we all know we've arrived when we've got a jazzy snazzy word for ‘dead’.
HZ: Something to look forward to.
EVIE KING: I sound so disrespectful sometimes. I have to walk this line, because they said this to the people who worked at the Auschwitz Museum, the - whatever, the gift shop, or I wouldn't say it was a gift shop, but you know what I mean, the ticket office: they can't just be sad all the time. It's not possible. And it's the same with everyone who works in death - but we are never laughing at people, and we're never happy anyone's dead. We just have to be alive for the people to be serviced well, because if we are walking around like dead ourselves, we're really no use to anyone. So you have to keep a certain level of levity - but not disrespectful levity. My name is Evie King. I'm the author of the book Ashes to Admin: the Caseload of a Council Funeral Officer, and it's all about my job carrying out funerals for those without family or without money.
HZ: I think a lot of people wouldn't even know that that job exists.
EVIE KING: Yes. I often find that when people ask me, "What do you do?" and I tell them, there's this sort of penny dropping moment where they think, “What a weird job.” And then they think, “No, actually, no, that makes perfect sense, because of course there are people who need that,” but it doesn't occur to us most of the time when we're walking around in our everyday lives. But then once they've found out that job exists, they then want to know what that job involves.
HZ: Yeah, what's the usual follow up question once they're in that bit of chitchat with you?
EVIE KING: A lot of people want to know the gory stuff, like “Do you see bodies?” and things like that. That's where most people go straight to, with everyone's obsession with true crime. And people aren't as weary of death as you'd think. I got a lot of feedback when I was pitching the book that “People don't wanna read about this, people don't like death.” And I'm looking at the TV and there's the Walking Dead and there's all these true crime pods. It's like people love death. They hate it, but but they love it. They can't get away from it, and they're tied to it, so they're going to have a relationship with it whether they want to or not.
HZ: Do you think that people's kind of fascination with it is partly the thing that also makes people bad at talking about death, which is fear of it happening to you or close to you? Not ‘you’ specifically, I mean ‘you’ in the general sense.
EVIE KING: Yes. It almost feels like an invocation, doesn't it? If you start talking about it too much, it does create that kind of, "Stop talking about that now," as though you are you are beckoning it and it's getting closer the more you speak of it.
HZ: Do you think that is how people feel, the death amateurs rather than the death professionals, that by talking about it, you might summon it?
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah, I do. And people have said that to me. I've had so many people who are not in the club say, “I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but I feel like if I talk about it too much, I'll end my good luck of like not having had any big deaths, not having to go to any funerals.” When you tell someone, “My dad died of cancer, I was 15.” And if they haven't experienced it, everything in their body goes, “I don't want my parents to die! This woman's talking about parents dying, how can I get away from her?” And it's a weird thing when you are someone who does talk about it and does acknowledge it, and then you sort of encounter the most of the world who's like, “Oh, no, not me; I'm not gonna die. No one I love is going to die” - that protection that we put up on ourselves to save ourselves from the truth that we are humans and the only thing we can all guarantee is that we're gonna die.
EVIE KING:And I understand also why you wouldn't just wanna keep talking about something that is not particularly fun to think about. But for me, it's not anything. I don't find it scary. I don't find it sad. I just find it anything - like a cake, or a bin. It's just there. But I can see why some people would be like, "Look, I'm going to die, so I'm alive now. I don't really wanna think about it." But I think it goes hand in hand with being alive. And it makes me feel more alive, and more urgent each day to get things done and to not just say, "I won't make that call,” or “I won't go and see that show," because I'm on the clock here. So it actually makes me feel more alive. I had a bucket list when I was very young, when I was five.
HZ: That’s very forward-thinking.
EVIE KING: My mum found it in my dungarees. And it was “go on more buses”, which is nice and achievable. And I have done that, that's done. “See a lion.”
HZ: Any luck? And you haven't been eaten by a lion, it wasn't like the last thing on your bucket list?
EVIE KING: I have seen a lion in a zoo setting, but not on a safari. So maybe I need to work on that. You can't be life-affirming without knowing that death's coming. Otherwise, life would just be this long, never ending, pointless thing that just doesn't have any focal point. It would just keep going on and on and on, and that would be horrific.
HZ: Like Cariad, Evie finds that people working in the death industry don’t talk awkwardly about death.
EVIE KING: Even though we're working in death, we're kind of always talking about the person in the present tense almost, because we're dealing with their funeral. They're very much the star of the show. So we'll be calling them by their first name and we'll be saying, "You need to collect Peter from the mortuary." And it's already accepted that they've died. So the word ‘dead’ very rarely leaves our lips, because we're already in that agreed world where everyone's dead except us. So we don't even need to say it at that point.
HZ: Yeah, living Peter wouldn't need you.
EVIE KING: No! If Peter was fine, he wouldn't be involved with us. So we tend to talk so normally, like you would about a colleague in the office or a mutual; it's almost death's not even present. The only way that death becomes present for us is when we're actually signing the paperwork and we are using words like 'buried', 'cremated'. And my relationship, on all death certificates that I do, to the deceased - because usually when you're registering, you would be like, the relationship is daughter, son - my relationship to everyone is 'causing the body to be cremated' or ‘causing the body to be burned’, or buried, which is very an odd relationship to have with a lot of people. But that's the only time the word ‘body’ is ever used because it has to be technically used on the death certificate. We don't talk about bodies. But we don't shy away from 'died' or 'is dead' because there's nothing wrong with that term. It's not disrespectful. It helps people, it really helps people if you’re honest in your language.
When I'm breaking news, which I had to do on Monday, actually, I was in a house, where I was told that if I could find an address book amongst all of the buildup of years of, of not quite hoarding, but everything had just been left where it had last been used and it accumulated - if I could find an address book, I should look up the name of a relative and that person would be able to probably take back over the funeral. But the police and coroner couldn't find it, not surprisingly. So when I did find it and I flipped to the letter and found the name, I phoned - and I can barely remember what I said, but I didn't use euphemisms like "pass away". I said, "I'm in the home of your relative, and I'm sorry to say that they" - I think I said - "they have died, and that's why I'm phoning you from their phone." And the person took a breath after they'd taken the news in and went, "You broke that news really well. That's really, really well done.”
HZ: An instant review!
EVIE KING: I think it's because I, yes. Yeah, it was great. Could you please review me on Google? I think you have to acknowledge that it's happened and it's real, and you have to acknowledge it's weird, and that involves not beating around the bush. So euphemisms are unhelpful at that point. Directness is helpful. It gets everyone on the same page and gets everyone happy with where we are. Well, not happy, but you know, as happy as you can be.
HZ: Yes. I suppose as long as you're clear, then there are fewer avenues for their mind to go down.
EVIE KING: Yes, they're absolutely instantly there. They know what's happening. And then you have to really bring in the realities, because they're going to take over the arrangements now, it’s now off my desk. Really, really honest conversations have to take place about the state of the situation and how the person died. People appreciate that. I think when reality hits, you actually do want someone to be straight down the line with you. The bit where you can then be a bit more soft, that's for families, I think; at the funeral, that's when you can start talking around it a little bit and softening the edges.
HZ: This seems like almost a silly question, but maybe not: how do you define grief? Like, is it the sorrow at the loss of a future you don't have? Is it something else?
CARIAD LLOYD: You can define it lots of ways, I think. It used to be only really defined in terms of death - death of a person, a human, and the set of emotions you feel after the death of a human. It's become a much broader umbrella word that can encompass loss of a future, loss of a job, loss of a house, loss of a country, a status… You can have grief if you or somebody who thought you were gonna get married and have kids and live in a house a certain way, and then you find yourself not living in that way. So I think it can apply to lots of things. Julia Samuel is a grief psychotherapist, really amazing person and who's written lots of books about it. And she describes them as ‘living losses’. So you can have things that are living losses, things that are not about death. But my wheelhouse is the death one.
HZ: A term that I found useful in your book was ‘anticipatory grief’ because with my dad, he had advanced Parkinson's and dementia, so what I had while he was still alive was the grief that he wasn't there anymore, except he was also an immediate physical concern, and quite mean. So it was like this kind of grief constipation, where you can't let it out. And then when he died, it was sort of over. It was like the grief stopped on his death rather than started. It was very weird.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah. And that's really common when I speak to people who've lost people to Alzheimer's, dementia, because the person is disappearing before they are dead. And so you are anticipatory-grieving them, but also they aren't dead, so you haven't like gone through the door of forever, I'll never see them. And it is a weird halfway house, I suppose. And that's what I found so interesting doing the Griefcast and writing the book and finding out terms which I felt weren't layman's terms: all the grief community were like, “Oh yes, that's an absolutely common thing that happens,” you're like, "No one bloody knows about this! Tell them, like tell them that this is going on!" Because there's all these people sitting there going, "I sort of feel like I've grieved already, but that can't be right, that that must be wrong." And I wanted to put those terms down really easily for people and be like, yeah, anticipatory grief, completely normal. Especially when - they say you get it almost as soon as there's a diagnosis, because a part of you is like, "Oh, that's how they're going to die, is through that." So you are already preparing yourself, and a part of your brain is already processing, "Okay, I know that person is going to die imminently.” And even if it is years from that moment, your muscles are tensed, ready for it, you know?
HZ: Well, my dad was very into chainsawing until a couple of years before his death, so that's how I thought he would go, slicing himself in half, doing something he loved.
CARIAD LLOYD: That sounds really cool.
HZ: I can think of worse things. The cleanup would've been horrific, compared to what did happen.
CARIAD LLOYD: Ooh, that would not have been good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That would've not been pretty.
HZ: Meanwhile, at the far end of the emotional seesaw, Evie King is arranging funerals for people she never even met, let alone had any kind of emotional bond with.
EVIE KING: It's a strange form of connection to someone, to just know them once they've died and to not have had any connection with them at all when they were alive. Because that's where you're getting grief from. You're getting grief from losing them. But I never had them. And a lot of the time their family didn't always have them. So I've got this kind of universal grief for us all.
HZ: That's very generous.
EVIE KING: Yeah. I'm very nice, aren't I?
HZ: Like a central repository of generalised grief.
EVIE KING: I just don't know if I can keep it up. I was saying earlier today I feel quite burned out because I've got four cases this week, and how much emotion can you give? One thing did make me cry this morning, where this person who had died had died in hospital, and they died in the December and their relative had gone into hospital themselves in the October. So while they were in hospital, their relative died. And then they were discharged just last month into a care home because they had vascular dementia. I don’t know if they were even aware that their relative had died. But once I'd got involved, I called their care home where they are now. And I needed a few questions answering for the death certificate: maiden name, occupation, place of birth. So I put all these in a list for the carer, and also I wrote: “And what would you like said at the funeral?” And everything came back as, “I don't remember.” “I don't remember.” All of the facts, they'd just forgotten everything about their parent. But at the bit where it said “What would you like said at the funeral?” they said, “Please tell her I love her.” I just bawled at my dad. It was just like, no, don't, this job needs to stop. Because I'd had a really sad day on Monday and I was just like, aaargh, I can't keep it up! But then you just have to snap back into the room and get on with the actual admin of like, “Okay, I've got this information, I don't have that, I need to write this out.”
HZ: It’s what it all boils down to in the end, isn't it?
EVIE KING: Yes, absolutely. t's so contrasting, isn't it? You know, the, the, the death certificate admin and the pure emotion. We are just admin waiting to happen. It's this sacred ritual and it's paperwork, and it's hold music. And sometimes the wonderful stuff comes out of the admin as well. When you just ask rudimentary questions on the referral form, they can release stories into the ether. Like I have to ask marital status, because death certificates are nosy and they want to know if you are divorced or single or married. And I asked once, um, uh, what's the marital status, please, of the care home manager? And they went, “Married for a week, but we didn't talk about it.”
HZ: Oh my God. That’s such a big story!
EVIE KING: And I'm like, my God, the story! And it's just come out in this little form I'm filling in, you know, there's just a form. But stories are so prevalent that they'll come out everywhere. They'll come out in forms, they'll come out in phoning the bank. People cannot be kept down. People's anecdotes and stories cannot be kept down. They're just too big.
HZ: There's so many week-long marriages you could fit into a lifespan.
EVIE KING: Sponsored marriages.
HZ: It might get a little repetitive after a while. Don't want your later marriages to be derivative of your early work.
EVIE KING: Oh, these, yeah. These are getting a little bit hackneyed.
HZ: If you take anything from this show, it should be this: do some of your own posthumous admin now, while you’re alive, for whoever has to deal with your business when you do die.
EVIE KING: Yes, please. You just need a little paper trail of who should I call in the event, and who else would you want to know? And also just a little handy list of - if you can have a bureau drawer or a desk with all of your gas, electric water, that would be eminently helpful as well. Because I do need to inform all of your suppliers and digging things like that up and around in various bits of the house, and not knowing if I've got a complete set is a bit stressful. And same for your relatives. It's the same thing, but it's just I do it differently: I do it as a profession, your relatives will be doing this for you personally. You need to shut down the person's mobile account and credit card. And so having all that stuff in a list - this is where I bank, this is who my phone provider is - just means a nice, neat tying up of affairs, and not a protracted, prolonged thing where six months down the line you find some loyalty card that you keep getting letters for and you have to phone them and go through it again and go through the pain of reporting them dead again. Because every time you have to report them dead, it's like it's happened all over again, isn't it? So it's nice to get it done in one big let it go, pull off the bandaid.
HZ: While you’re at it, specify what you would like to happen to you upon your death: what do you want to happen to your body, do you want any ceremony, if so what do you want to happen at it? If you don’t put your wishes somewhere - in your will, or in your Big Book of Posthumous Arrangements that you keep in an easy-to-find spot - then someone else is stuck with having to guess at what you might have wanted. Help them out by putting it all in writing!
EVIE KING: I have this horrible job of deciphering what I should do for the best, and I constantly fear that I'm doing wrong - because if I don't have any evidence of a religion or a will, I have to err on the side of cremation. There are some times when I've found things out by almost accident and they've guided me, but if I hadn't have found those things out, I would've done wrong by the person. So there was one person who, when I did find their relative, when I said, “What are their wishes?” they said, “He always used to just say, ‘Please don't let them burn me’.” So can you imagine if I'd erred on the side of cremation for that person? I couldn't live with myself. you don't even have to have a proper will, if it's too much hassle or you don't have things to bequeath, then it's a lot of money to say, “Here, have my PlayStation.” If you could just, in a notebook somewhere, say - just a note to your relatives as well, that could help them, because when they're trying to make a decision, when they're a distraught, you know, it could help them amazingly if they could hear your voice in a way saying, “I'm not fussed about a burial or a cremation,” or anything you want, or, “I'd rather this,” and then you can proceed knowing you're doing the right thing by the person, and relax in the knowledge that you haven't burned them when they fear that the most, or buried them when they wanted to be scattered to the wind.
CARIAD LLOYD: These are horrible things to think about, but if you think about them very practically, it's like, well just, do you want that to happen? No? Okay, write it down. That's all, it's not scary. You're not calling down the fates when you write it down. And I do know what that feels like, cuz that's how I feel like it is, so I understand the irrational nature of it. But yeah, you know…
EVIE KING: And just other things too, like what music should we play if we're having a service - that would be useful. A lot of people don't know the favorite song of their parent or daughter or son, and suddenly you have to make this decision about how the service is going to look, and it's horrible. It's like planning a wedding, when you get all stressed because it has to be perfect. And if you've got all these potholes where you can't see if that's the right thing to do, or “I don't know what they would have wanted,” it suddenly gets a lot more stressful and anxious. So it's nice to have that guidance from the person, just so that you know you haven't done anything they wouldn't have wanted to do, and so that the living can feel happy, and like they've drawn a proper line under it and done it as well as they could.
HZ: It's also usually a shorter time scale than a wedding, and people are often in distress, and that's a very hard time to make decisions. So no wonder you get quite a lot of farewells that don't feel that specific to the person being sent off.
EVIE KING: Yeah. Yes. Someone dies and then the timeline goes really quickly. You need to get a funeral director to collect them, then you need to get a medical cause of death certificate so that you can register them dead, and then you will need to speak to the funeral director about how it's gonna look and feel - and if you don't have any idea about that, you are just gonna sit there in a daze and go, “Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Play that song, that's fine, just play some classical music, yeah.” And suddenly you're sitting in a funeral that you're not really connecting to.
It's a nice little note to make. I mean, it's not a fun, fun note to make, but it actually makes you think about your life and think about yourself a little bit. And it can be an oddly fun thing to go “Actually, what are my favorite songs? I’m not sure.” Eulogizing yourself a little bit, saying, “What do I want people to say or think about me, and what do I hope they would say and think about me? AndI do want you to make sure you mention that time with the thing.” And then you can sit there and sort of remember your life in a way before you're gone. You get to be at your own funeral with your little notebook and pen.
HZ: You mention in the book that often all you have of the people, of their stories and their personalities, is what you're able to find in writing, if you can't find any living people to talk about them. So it does sort of make sense to have your big book of personal anecdotes and qualities, as well as written down addresses and phone numbers of anyone relevant in the event of your death.
EVIE KING: Yes. I have this growing problem with locked phones, locked laptops, locked tablets. Because we're all online mostly, and we do have all our contacts there, but I can't get to them. So that written address book, which is a dying breed, is absolutely invaluable. So we need to kind of keep a little bit analog, for the people that don't have our PIN for our phone to be able to find who to call - because you do have lots of categories of people who will want to know you've died but won't be able to find out because they're not next of kin, they won't have been informed, or it'll get to them six months down the line because of the way the news is broken.
HZ: So you need like an easy to find folder of your posthumous admin and contacts. As well as some anecdotes.
EVIE KING: Ideally. I have a handful of folders, with my practicals and, yes, contacts - and yeah, I really need to write down some anecdotes. Although, I say that - I'm not having a funeral!
HZ: Yeah. But people might like them anyway.
EVIE KING: Yeah, people might like to just flick through them while they're searching my property. My memoirs, I'll just write my memoirs. But yeah, just those contacts so that people do know what's happened to you, because you have all these connections in life and people will disappear and you won't necessarily know where they've gone. And it's nice to have that knowledge.
HZ: Now let’s think about what we say to people when they have been bereaved. Always tricky, I find, like trying to come up with something original, heartfelt and funny when signing a communal birthday card, but with a lot of added solemnity and sadness because of the death. What are the options? The ones I’m familiar with are not amazing.
CARIAD LLOYD: I used to be really… really angry, which is quite common in the grief community, when people say like, “Sorry for your loss.” When people start saying to you all the time, like, “I'm sorry for your loss,” you sort of wanna punch them because you're like, “I haven't lost them, and you didn't do it.” It feels a very meaningless phrase. But the older I've got, and the more I've moved away from like the epicenter of my grief, the more I'm like, you know what, it's not great, it's not perfect, but it kind of does the best it can, in the way that I think the English language is very good at going, “Look, it'll do.”
HZ: It's a placeholder for saying, “I feel bad for what you're going through, and there's no right thing to say, so I'm going to say the wrong one, rather than saying nothing, because saying nothing would be worse than saying something that's not great.”
CARIAD LLOYD: Exactly! And I really do say to people all the time: saying nothing is a hundred percent not the thing to do. That is bad. It's not helpful. It makes people feel isolated; and grief already makes you feel isolated, it already supposedly lights up the part of your brain that lights up when you're depressed. So it already makes you feel like no one understands, and you are alone in these feelings. So when people don't say anything, you think, “There you go, there's the evidence: no one understands me.” So I do say to people who rage against it, “Look, it's what we've got.” Because I went to Sweden, I got asked to do a Griefcast live in Sweden. And I thought they'd ask me because they were groovy cool people that talked about death. And they were like, “Oh, no, no, we don't, we can't talk about it. That's why you are here. We are worse than British people.”
HZ: Worse than British people?!
CARIAD LLOYD: Worse than British people! I know!
HZ: Oh God. You need a can opener to get into them then.
CARIAD LLOYD: Oh my God, I was so shocked. We were talking about “I'm sorry for your loss” and I said, “What would you say?” And they said, “We don't have a phrase. The only phrase we have is a very, very old-fashioned phrase, it's kind of like old-fashioned Swedish.” So it's the equivalent of me saying “My dearest sirrah, my sorrow passes upon your heart on this day,” in that it's so old-fashioned you just wouldn't say it to someone even though you understand the meaning of what they're trying to say, it's a ridiculous thing to say. And so I was like, “Oh, so you do have this phrase, but you are embarrassed to use it,” and they said, “Yeah.” And I said, “So what do you do?” And they went, “We say nothing. You just say nothing.” And I was like, “Wow.” And they were like, “Yeah, yeah, we have this moment where you think, God, I wish there was something I could say, but there isn't,” and so it passes. And that sort of weirdly gave me this comfort to know that in the stakes of emotional repression, we're not number one, because we so often are.
HZ: We failed even to win at that.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah, but it made me really appreciate “I'm sorry for your loss” because all this years I had rolled my eyes at it and been like, “Ugh, such an irritating phrase.” Actually, at least it's there. At least it's that hand-hold that you need when you are struggling, as you said, to just try and say something. And I think, if you don't like that phrase or if you don’t know what to say, really the best thing to do in grief is to literally say what's in your head. And if in your head is, “I dunno what to say,” say “I dunno what to say.” Just say to someone, “I don’t know what to say. I just want you to know I'm so sorry and I feel so awful and I wish I could help you. And I wish there was something better in my head than that. Sorry.” Like that's equally fine than “I'm sorry for your loss”, which is a very neater phrase of saying it. So don't be afraid to admit like, “Oh God, I have no idea what to say to you, but I really want to help. I just don’t know how.”
HZ: I feel like this comes up time and again, just sort of the only thing that you need to say is: “That's really shit, I'm sorry.”
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah. It's almost like it's too simple for people.
HZ: Yeah. Well you want to find the magic code words that fix it.
CARIAD LLOYD: You want to say something eloquent and devastating and brilliant that that is somehow gonna make them feel okay.
HZ: That’s got to be possible.
CARIAD LLOYD: And the worst thing has happened, like someone they loved or had a complicated relationship has died. So you can't redead the dead by you saying something shit. You can't really make it worse. You might upset them by being tactless, but you'll upset them more by acting like it didn't happen. And to just say to someone, “God, that's shit. I'm so sorry” - you feel like, oh, they heard me. They're not tidying it up or putting a bow on it. Or talking about someone like they were saying they heard what I said, which is like, somebody I love just died and they went, “God, that is shit.” And you're like, yes, exactly! It is! It is shit. So yeah, don't be afraid to just be blunt about it in that way.
EVIE KING: I always send a message to friends saying, “No need to reply. Just wanted to say to you, hi, and I'm here. But just no, literally no need to reply.” Because I don't want people to think I'm not thinking of them, it's for the avoidance of doubt - I let them know it's space I'm giving them and not forgetting that they exist.
HZ: But I think this is a common theme in a lot of circumstances. People want to show support and love, but it's hard to know what to say when also there isn't much to say.
EVIE KING: No, there's nothing to say. And I again, would sort of err on that side of things. I always just go, “Not much I can say, really: it's shit,” and that's it. Nothing much I can really say, nothing I can help you with other than do you want any errands running, nothing I can help you with because this is not a help situation. No one can help.
HZ: A phrase that I’ve noticed more and more - I think it was originally supposed to be what you said about rabbis or particularly high ranking rabbis - is “May their memory be a blessing.”
CARIAD LLOYD: Oh! That's nice. I like that. That's lovely.
HZ: Yeah. Unless some of their memories are not a blessing.
CARIAD LLOYD: This is the problem, the pedestal that people get put on when they die. So they might say something about my dad of like, “Oh gosh, you know, you must have been so close to him.” And I'm like, no, really, really not. “You must miss him terribly.” Well, he was never really around, so we had a really difficult relationship, and he was an obsessive workaholic, and that's why I do a podcast about him and I wrote a book about him because if he'd been a cool, easygoing dad that I had a very easy relationship, I probably wouldn't need to talk about it that much, I would probably be fine. The other one I really, really hate: “Grief is the price you pay for love.” I. Hate. It. I hate it.
HZ: Shut ittt!
CARIAD LLOYD: I’m so alone! Everyone loves that phrase, but you know what? I speak to so many people who didn't feel love for someone who's gone, but they do feel grief. And it's such an assumption to assume that there was love and that the relationship was equal, or was loving, or was tender or was nurturing. So to say to someone, “I'm so sorry you’re grieving, grief is the price you pay for love,” it's like: fuck you! You don't know what someone's relationship is. And to me, it's really rude to assume that it was a loving one, because so many of us have such complicated relationships with people. And what it does is, it makes people think, “ I have to have had love in the relationship to be able to grieve them.” And that isn't true. You can grieve someone you hated. You can grieve someone you weren't speaking to for twenty years. You can grieve someone that you never got that forgiveness from that you needed. You can still feel grief for the person that they weren't, that you thought they were going to be. So I think it's really important to go in knowing just don't make any assumptions about why someone is grieving. You don't know.
HZ: We'll get into the My Therapy portion of the recording:
CARIAD LLOYD: Sure.
HZ: My dad, and also a friend who died a couple of years ago: they were both very difficult people, and quite difficult people to have in your life. And the way that people talked about them after when I think they were trying to express sympathy to me, was like they were talking about different people, because it was so hagiographic and I was like, this is so inaccurate. I feel like my opportunity to feel sorry for them has been taken from me, almost.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing, like we said: people get put on a pedestal as soon as they're dead. They're an angel, you know, they could do nothing wrong. And I had the same thing. My dad was a really difficult character. He was brilliant in many ways, but he was like Marmite, people did not like him straight away. People would come up to me and my brother and be like, “He was such a wonderful father,” and you're like, who are you talking about? Because it is not our dad. And like you said, that, that then removes you, like the dishonesty of that makes you go, well, I'm not grieving that person. I'm grieving the mess, the messy person who was real and flawed and brilliant and awful at the same time. And yeah, I think sometimes we really want grief to be neat and tidy, heading towards a finish line, rather than the truth of most grief, which is like, they were really complicated, I didn't quite get what I needed from them in many ways, but I got all these other things I didn't know I needed, and I miss them like hell, but also some days I'm relieved I don't have to talk to them, because they were so difficult. And that's all of those things at the same time, that's all part of grief. But then we feel guilty for those negative feelings, inverted commas ‘negative feelings’, because we think, “I'm talking ill of the dead” - people are real. They're not perfect. So why when they die would they suddenly become angelic? It's not possible.
HZ: I do like it when people say, “I'm sorry your dad died. I remember this thing he did,” or they show me a photo that they've got. That, when available - because it's not available to everyone, particularly if they didn't know him - is great.
CARIAD LLOYD: Yeah. Yeah. And sharing memories, genuine memories, there's nothing wrong with that. It's the whitewashing, it's the cleaning up of someone's life that can make the grieving person feel, again, isolated, because they're talking about someone that they don't know. So then you're like, “No one really understands how I feel.” Which might be just utter love and, um, and pure sadness. Absolutely. People have those relationships, but it might be more complicated and nuanced than that.
EVIE KING: I follow a lot of grief accounts, and a lot of the time I see people reporting that they want people to say the person's name, “Say their name to me.” Because it makes them feel like they're still around and they're not forgotten. So I guess I would jump in around anniversaries or things like that, I would mention them. I make a note of anniversaries of significant deaths for friends, just so I don't stomp on something, not thinking, and then I'm texting them silly things on the date of their parents' death.
HZ: And you know that, months later they will still be feeling it, but then you're like, “How do I bring it up, I don't wanna ruin their day if they're not thinking about it,” all that.
EVIE KING: Yes. It's the worst time, actually, the many months afterwards because the initial news, everyone rallies round for condolences, condolences. The funeral, that's a focal point, everyone can do something then and say something and bring a casserole. But then the funeral finishes and I think that's when it's hard, because then you are in a wasteland of: we don't have a ritual for this. We don't have a conversation template for this. So we just sort of don't talk about it anymore. Obviously it's individual as well. So you've got to gauge it based on how you think the individual would want to deal with it. Some people never want to talk of it again. Some people will want to talk about it all the time. But yeah, there's no template for talking about it afterwards. We're not very death-savvy in our culture. I mean, I wouldn't go to the extreme of like those tribes that dig them up once a year and hang out with them at a picnic. But we have to have some in between. We have to be able to still talk about people that we're missing.
CARIAD LLOYD: And the thing I always say to people as well of like, if you aren't there or you muck it up, or you feel like, oh, I don't know how to help them, it's not short term. Like someone is going to have to live with this grief for the rest of their life and they're going to have to learn to grow their life around it. So I always say to people like, just be there for the long haul, keep showing up. For someone to show up like that, I think is really groundbreaking for most of us in the club to be like, oh, wow. I'm not the only person who's remembering them, who's dealing with this. So don't worry if you don't know how to help them immediately. I know we feel so powerless as people, when someone's grieving, you just wanna like help them immediately, fix it immediately. But there's lots of long-term ways you can show up for someone. So don't rush to be the superhero.
But it's not easy to stand by someone who's grieving. It's not easy to have these conversations. All I can tell you is it gets easier. Like the more you do it, the easier it gets - as with all things.
Do you remember, a couple of years ago on this show there was an episode called Additions and Losses, in which the musician and writer Christa Couture talks about the things people say when they want to commiserate with your bereavement. Like “everything happens for a reason” - ughhh! It’s a great episode, she’s amazing - and she has just released an animated series about loss, How To Lose Everything, which is available on the CBC in Canada, I’m not sure how else you can get it in other countries, but I’m sure you have your means, and I particularly recommend the fifth episode, Grape Soda in the Parking Lot, because it’s about the loss of oppressed languages, extremely relevant to our allusionary interests. I’ll link to the series How To Lose Everything at theallusionist.org/death.
While you’re on the website, you could hit the ‘donate’ button to support this independent podcast with your spare change, and in return members of the Allusioverse will get to listen to a live event I did with Arnie Niekamp from Hello from the Magic Tavern a few years ago where we planned our funerals and the audience gave us their plans, apparently you can’t be fed to a lion, zoos won’t allow it. The premise was a show I wanted to make for a long time but now never will, but I thought it was a good idea to plan your funeral before it’s a particularly looming prospect, and have it on public record for whoever actually has to do it when our time on Earth does conclude. Anyway it’s a funny show and you get to hear it if you go to theallusionist.org/donate, and you also receive behind the scenes information about the making of each episode - I’m recording this one in a bathroom! I had to pause so the upstairs neighbour could flush the loo! - and you get regular livestreams featuring relaxing readings from reference books, and best of all the Allusioverse Discord community, where this week we’ve been talking about caring for declining loved ones and their deaths, but also we’ve been discussing the word for baby puffins (it’s puffling!) and gargoyles in sexy books, yes that’s a thing. Join us, theallusionist.org/donate.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
bum-bailiff, noun, historical, derogatory: a bailiff who collected debts or arrested debtors. Origin 17th century from bum, so named because of the association of an approach from behind.
Try using ‘bum-bailiff’ in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman, with music by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. You heard from Cariad Lloyd and Evie King. Cariad hosts Griefcast, available in all the podplaces, and has just released a book, You Are Not Alone, which is a memoir of her grief as well as a lot of other people’s experiences and advice, plus the history of things like the Five Stages of Grief, and the Victorians devising official and very prescriptive grieving rites, which you’ll hear about in an upcoming episode of this show as well.
Evie King is a council funeral officer and she has written all about what that job involves in her fascinating new book Ashes To Admin. Each case she gets is a little mystery she has to solve, of who the person was and how best to commemorate their life and lay them to rest. I found it very interesting to talk with Cariad and Evie and read both their books consecutively, because they’re approaching death from very different routes - Cariad very personal and emotional, Evie the opposite - but often arriving at similar thoughts about the language around it. I’d love to know yours as well, and if any phrases have worked particularly well for you (or not) when you’ve been bereaved or when you’ve expressed sorrow for someone else’s bereavement. And if you’re Swedish, let me know if you do actually have some options that Cariad didn’t get to hear about. Get in touch: find @allusionistshow on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Our ad partner is Multitude. If you want to sponsor the show and hear me talking beguilingly about your product to the attentive and discerning listeners, get in touch at multitude.productions/ads.
And you can hear or read every episode, get links to more information about the topics therein, and see the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words, all at the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
