"Car cries are like, extra cathartic. What's with that?"

April 27, 2017 2:35 PM

Grief Is Weird (part 2, part 3) is a short comic by artist Sara Goetter about dealing with losing her mom. (Goetter previously.)
posted by cortex (23 comments total)

Read this as my daughter was chatting at me, and now I don't want her to see me cry. This comic captures a bunch of resonant stuff. Thank you, cortex.
posted by MonkeyToes at 2:43 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Not having lost my mom, but having lost someone I adored, I can attest that car cries are, indeed, extra cathartic. This was spot on. Thanks for posting.
posted by annieb at 2:56 PM on April 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

Grief is a strange thing. I've never really grieved my mom passing, but she had been in decline due to Alzheimer's for so long that I think I did my grieving gradually over time beforehand.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:00 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

For me, it wasn't car cries as much, but the basement cries were damn near divine in their power to relieve pain. I expected the big holidays to be challenging, like Christmas, his birthday, and Father's Day but they weren't. Mainly because Dad hated holidays and making a fuss. But the first big storm that happened after he passed and no one called to see if I survived the "Tornado," and there was another epic basement cry.

Thanks for this.
posted by teleri025 at 3:06 PM on April 27, 2017 [5 favorites]

Maybe it's because car cries can be private? No need to worry about what other people are thinking.
posted by Paul Slade at 3:15 PM on April 27, 2017

This is a good comic and you should feel bad.
posted by Going To Maine at 3:27 PM on April 27, 2017

fuck this is making me cry.

Dad died on Dec. 30. He was 89, had a good life and a good run.

And the line about not profiting from her mother's death -- just gutting.
posted by suelac at 3:40 PM on April 27, 2017 [7 favorites]

this is good, thank you.
and also very, very, very difficult to read because even though it's been five* years this July, it still frequently feels fresh and raw and incomprehensible and now I'm crying so I'll have to come back to this later.

_{*how it can possibly be five years is confounding because it feels like yesterday and also like a lifetime ago. Grief is a strange thing, indeed.}
posted by ApathyGirl at 3:41 PM on April 27, 2017 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting these! They're really pretty. But I'm a little jealous the protagonist got the opportunity to resolve her grief before getting hit with more, because that's been my experience with grief for over a decade now and I'm getting worn out trying to keep this dam plugged up! The hardest cases of grief, in my experience, are those where you have an unresolved conflict with a loved one. My grandmother, for instance, died suddenly while my wife and I were visiting family in Germany on our honeymoon, and she never really enthusiastically approved of my choice of partners, so for the next couple of years I had vivid dreams where I was back in my childhood home but it was haunted now by my grandmother's vengeful ghost because she was still so disappointed in me for having chosen my then wife over her. When my mom died of cancer a few years later, in some ways, that grief was actually easier to resolve because we were with her at her bedside when she died and she told me goodbye and that everything would be okay with a simple gesture that called back to the time I'd lived with her in Germany before being kidnapped in a way that only a mother really could.

A lot of the problems I've had in life trace back to choices my mom made or didn't make, but there was never any doubt she loved me and that felt especially clear at the end, which is probably the only thing that made that loss bearable coming as it did immediately before another string of personal losses that followed in quick succession.
posted by saulgoodman at 3:41 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

For mom: Couch crying for 10 days straight listening to a tape of the soundtrack of "The Last Temptation of Christ" over and over and over.
When I had to go out, there was car crying.
Since then, when I come on a car going especially slow, I wonder, "Maybe their mom died."
posted by Mesaverdian at 6:19 PM on April 27, 2017 [6 favorites]

Today I received my first "hey! order this gift for Mothers' Day" solicitation of the season and even though years have gone by since my parents died I still get get hurt anew when the time comes each year to be bombarded with commercial solicitations callously reminding me that my parents are gone. It's not as raw as it once was but it still hurts year after year.
posted by Nerd of the North at 6:36 PM on April 27, 2017

thank you.
posted by sibboleth at 7:05 PM on April 27, 2017

My baby brother died ten years ago this week, and while I don't have a car to cry in, oh, LORD, I can relate to all of these comics. I call what this artist is going through "grief attacks" and they can incapacitate you from out of nowhere.
The good news is that there are less of them over time.
posted by tantrumthecat at 7:51 PM on April 27, 2017 [1 favorite]

Yeah, crying. Started when she said she was 25, because I was 25 when my father died. We weren't close or anything, but there have been a lot of moments that I wished he could have experienced since then.

It's funny, I don't remember feeling like I missed my father that much (I never felt like I was allowed to miss him that much), but I definitely still recognized my younger self in these drawings.
posted by dinty_moore at 9:30 PM on April 27, 2017

Is grief weird enough to admit I've experienced a good number of these same things, but with my favorite dog who passed unexpectedly in Dec? I still randomly cry and miss little things. I definitely had the fantasy that the vet was going to call me and say "oh, big mistake, we accidentally mixed Cookie up with another dog, would you please come and get her?"

Maybe that's insulting to this work, but I was too young to experience grief with finality when my dad passed (I was 8). I've lost friends, but it didn't hit me like this. Hell, maybe I just connect better with dogs.
posted by drewbage1847 at 11:21 PM on April 27, 2017 [3 favorites]

fuck.

I thought I was over the death of Sandra, it has been over five years after all, but the end of that first comic, the part where she dreams about her mother still being alive and sort of half knows even within the dream that it's a lie, yeah, that hit hard.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:07 AM on April 28, 2017

Crying at work. I totally get the 'grief attacks' too (my dad died 9 months ago). Just how they swoop in out of nowhere and then you have to decide whether you're going to ride with it or distract yourself. They always come at me when I'm in an inconvenient place (at work, like now, or during my commute). I appreciated reading this comic. I haven't read enough about grief. It is its own journey, its own adventure. Nothing compares to it.

Is this a good place to say that posting and reading through the AskMe archives on grief and loss and parents dying was really important and cathartic to me when my own dad was dying? I still remember soon after getting his diagnosis, sitting in his bedroom while he was sleeping and reading through an old AskMe question posted by someone whose mother had been diagnosed as terminal. I was crying and crying, reading those answers, but it also really helped me to know I wasn't alone - especially as in my circle of friends I am alone - 99% of them have their parents. It was also through MeFi that I found this link, one of the best pieces on grief and loss that I have yet read. Helped me a lot.
posted by Ziggy500 at 4:24 AM on April 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

It's been almost 20 years since my mom died. This made me cry, especially the panel with her mom and her two sisters, because I, too, have two sisters, and also the panel with her mother's gravestone, because her mother was born in the same year as me, 1964.

My mom doesn't have a gravestone. She was cremated and some of her ashes were sprinkled into the Pacific Ocean (common in Hawaii) and the rest were scattered into the winds off of a Hawaiian cliff by me, her oldest daughter. And now I'm crying again.
posted by ceejaytee at 6:08 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

My mom died June 2016. This was a tough read, but it was really good. The part where she dreams about just hanging out with her mom but her mom can't leave the bed and she has to tell her all this stuff before she goes again? Yeah. Now I'm ugly crying at work.
posted by aclevername at 6:11 AM on April 28, 2017

oh god
posted by Theta States at 7:08 AM on April 28, 2017

Self-link, but I made a book (PDF) collecting people's online accounts of dreaming about the dead. It was comforting to me, after I lost my own mom, to see how common and universally bewildering the phenomenon was.
posted by wreckingball at 7:43 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

My mom died almost 7 years ago (which does not seem real *at all*, I just had to triplecheck my math) and I recognize all of these stages. I was messed up in weird ways for about 8 months after she died, even though (or perhaps because) I'd had a very difficult relationship with her. Grief hurts. And it's random. And it breaks us open in ways we don't recognize until years later. Thank you for posting cortex.
posted by widdershins at 7:50 AM on April 28, 2017 [2 favorites]

Grief IS weird. "Weird" is the best word for it. My dad died on Father's Day last year, so I've been working my way through the anniversaries. First birthday after he died (mine); first Thanksgiving, first Christmas; six month anniversary of his death (which also happened to be the day my divorce was finalized, which was a very happy thing, so it was a really weird day); first his birthday and first mom's birthday; one year anniversary of the last time I saw him (my brother's birthday, ironically); and so on. Someone told me that there was a silver lining in his dying on Father's Day in that every year from now on I could combine the grieving of another Father's Day with the grieving of another anniversary of his death. Which is actually the exact opposite of how it really works, because now there will be grieving on every Father's Day AND every June 19th. Two anniversaries in the span of a week for the price of one.

Anyway, grief is weird in that it doesn't adhere to the calendar like the anniversaries do. The things you think will hit you the hardest are sometimes surprisingly okay, and the things that seem so innocuous punch the wind right out of you -- like when I noticed yesterday that one of my tomato plants has a tomato on it, and I wanted to call him and brag about so we could have the same conversation we had every year, wherein he would tell me that HIS tomato plants have had fruit on them for WEEKS and I'd roll my eyes and laugh because everything always turned into a competition. And now I'm winning because there's no one to compete with anymore, which is absolutely hollowest victory there is. Those are the weird and unpredictable little things that grief springs on you. You can try to inoculate yourself against and prepare yourself for the days you know will be hard, but man, you just can't predict when a random Thursday is going to break your heart.

Thanks for posting these comics. One of the weirdest things about grief is that it feels so unique, feels like something you were singled out for. It's not, though. It's something almost boringly common, and it's helpful to remember that.
posted by mudpuppie at 10:31 AM on April 28, 2017 [6 favorites]