How The Midnight Gospel helped me to grieve
I’ve always found comfort in cartoons. They’re my go to when I want to switch off from the world and go somewhere else and sometimes, for example in shows like Tuca & Bertie, they allow me to digest the bigger issues I know I should deal with in a format that doesn’t feel so scary and overwhelming. Tuca and Bertie came out just as I was set to leave university and it dealt with a lot of issues I could relate to like sexual harassment, abandonment issues and self-image all while wrapped up in the comforting cartoon form. I didn’t think I’d find that in a show again, until I recently came across The Midnight Gospel. The Midnight Gospel, a show based on comedian Duncan Trussell’s podcast, opens up to some deeper but just as relevant issues, and some that hit pretty close to home as I watched the series a day after losing my Grandad.
Death is the big scary monster under the bed. As soon as you’re a kid and you realise that your grandparents and parents aren’t going to live forever, you’re scared of it. At least I was. I remember being so terrified of losing my Grandad, especially when he was initially diagnosed with dementia. Years were spent terrified of phone calls because I always thought on the other end there would be bad news waiting. I had no idea how I would deal with his death. In all honesty, I didn’t think I could. It was rare I could bring myself to see him in his nursing home because the reality of death was so loud and so present. When my mind wandered to those parts and tried to accept what was happening, it just shut down. I couldn’t imagine a world where I would have to deal with such an awful loss. But then it happened. And I had no clue how to grieve, what to do or how to feel. This was my first big loss; the big one I had been dreading for as long as I could remember. I spent a lot of time sat on my own, frustrated because I just did not know how to deal with what I was feeling.
So I tried to comfort myself. And that’s how I ended up watching the entire season of The Midnight Gospel the day after my Grandad passed. I never thought I’d be so grateful to find a TV show of all things as I was when I stumbled, stuffy nosed and watery eyed, across Duncan Trussell and Pendleton Ward’s magical universe. Don’t get me wrong, in the initial depths of my grief it didn’t feel particularly magical at all. In episode two where Anne Lamott talks about how freeing it can be to just acknowledge death as an inevitable part of life, I didn’t feel comforted. I felt insulted almost. My Grandad, my hero, had just passed and everything felt so unbelievably heavy and sad — how could I just accept it? But as the episode went on, I opened up and was particularly drawn to the conversation about love.
What stuck with me was the quote: ‘through love, all pain will turn to medicine’. It wasn’t that I needed his death to make me realise just how much I loved my Grandad, but the love that was there meant that this pain wasn’t just pain for the sake of it. It had meaning and purpose and healing would follow. I was loved and loved in return and that’s why it hurt so much. This idea is something explored more in the poignant final episode that brought to life the podcast between Duncan and his then dying mother. How do you deal with grief, Duncan asks. To which his mother simply replies: you cry. She goes on to say how death will break your heart right open and it hurts, but what you’re experiencing is love and love goes far beyond physical bodies.
It helped a lot to be told that this all hurt so much because I had opened myself up to love. And what if I had never had that? What if I had never spent summers blackberry picking with my Grandad, spent weekends with him watching movies and eating corned beef sandwiches, all because I feared the loss that I would one day inevitably experience. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt so much and my heart wouldn’t have been broken open, but like Duncan’s mother says in the final episode our hearts have to be broken for them to be truly open. And as much as it hurts and I may not be ready to lean in towards death the way Clancy does in the show, I know I am better for having experienced that love and I know that it can’t go anywhere. So, I will cry because some days that’s all I can do. But I will remember when I’m amongst all these painful, undesirable feelings that I feel like this because of love.
