Nobody close to me has died recently. And yet, if you looked at what I’ve been watching, reading and listening to over the past year, you’d be forgiven for assuming otherwise. Sick matriarchs. Lost family houses. Dying protagonists. Families pulled apart by forces they never chose.
It took me a while to notice the pattern, and longer to admit what it was about.
There is a kind of grief that doesn’t come with a casserole or a funeral service. It’s grief for a version of your life that ended without anyone marking it. Before the pandemic. Before a marriage came apart. Before a couple of years of bad health, on a freelance income, took the financial ground out from under me. Nobody sends flowers for that. You just keep going, and look for somewhere to put the feeling.
That somewhere, it turns out, is other people’s stories. There is something cathartic about marinating in someone else’s troubles for a while. It’s a break from your own, and a reminder that you’re not the only one carrying something, whether their load is heavier or lighter than yours. Grief on screen or on the page also has a shape: a beginning, a middle, people who say the wrong thing at dinner. It gives you permission to feel something fully for two hours, and then close the book.
These are a few of the things I have had a cathartic cry to recently:
Love of Your Life
This is the one that got me thinking. Rachel Morrison’s new film stars Margaret Qualley as Maya, a 26-year-old Boston nurse who falls hard for Charlie (Gabriel Basso). Then March 2020 arrives, and everything after is shaped by it: the burnout, the loss, the relationships that don’t survive.
Qualley is in nearly every frame. It is a raw film, not a tidy one. What makes it so affecting is how ordinary its devastation feels. You recognise the exhaustion. You recognise the people who drift away. Everything about it is relatable, sometimes uncomfortably so. If you need a happy ending, this one might be a tough watch.
Heartbreak by Florence Williams
I read this in the days while my husband was packing to leave. I had no idea whether my heart would recover, or what life was going to look like on the other side. This book was a reassurance. You won’t die of a broken heart, but the pain is real, and it has to be grieved and gone through rather than around.
Williams, a science journalist, opens with the unexpected end of her 25-year marriage. When the loss starts making her physically ill, she goes looking for the science behind it: why heartbreak hurts the way it does, what it does to the body, what it’s like to start new relationships, and how you eventually move on. It is part memoir, part investigation, and it never loses sight of the person at the centre of it.
Even if you’re not going through heartbreak, it explains a lot. I loved it.
Past Lives
Celine Song’s Past Lives is in my top five films of all time, and it carries a tension most of us know well: the what-ifs. Nora (Greta Lee) leaves Seoul as a child, her family emigrating to Toronto. Decades later, married and living in New York (in a green card marriage), she is visited by Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), the boy she left behind.
You spend the film expecting it to take the easy path, the one that gives everyone their emotional payoff. It doesn’t. What happens instead is hard and surprising, and it stays with you for days. It is a film about missed chances, about making the “right” decision and moving on without drama, and about the grief folded inside that kind of grown-up choice.
It also does place beautifully. You can feel the heat of a New York summer. In one flashback, her parents smoke in a small room, the air thick: it brought me straight back to childhood when chain smoking inside was socially acceptable.
The Family Stone
My favourite holiday film is one I watch all year round, which probably tells you something. The Family Stone follows a large, opinionated family through one Christmas as they come to terms with their mother’s illness. Diane Keaton is the matriarch at the centre of it all, while her kids are played by some of the early 2000s A list.
It’s funny, it’s sad, and it’s endlessly endearing. More than 20 years on, it holds up. What makes it last is that nobody in it grieves gracefully. They bicker, make terrible decisions, and say exactly the wrong thing at the table. Grief, it turns out, looks a lot like family dinners.
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
This is the book I can’t stop thinking about. Siblings Danny and Maeve Conroy lose their family home, then spend decades parked outside it, reliving what happened there. It is less about losing people than about how a place can hold everyone you’ve lost.
This one lands almost too close to home for me. I grew up on my family’s generational farm, and it is no longer ours. I can’t visit, but I think about it every day. If I lived nearer, I suspect I’d be doing the occasional drive-by of my own. The torture for the Conroys isn’t the remembering. It’s not knowing what’s going on inside.
When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi
If you need a good cathartic cry, this will do it. Kalanithi was a neurosurgeon who wrote this memoir while he was dying of cancer, and he didn’t live to finish it.
What makes it so affecting is the double perspective. He understands his illness as a doctor, and lives it as a patient. He writes about both with clarity. Underneath is a man working out what he wants his legacy to be, and how he’d like to be remembered. It is beautiful.
Pachinko
Min Jin Lee’s novel needs no introduction, but if you missed the Apple TV series, it’s time to catch up. It’s the perfect fall watch. Told in three languages, across countries and generations, it follows one family shaped by circumstances well beyond their control. The grief here is for futures they never had a say in. That kind of loss is harder to name than a death, and Pachinko is patient enough to sit with it.
This one is not relatable in any way to me, but I have deep appreciation for the history and storytelling portrayed. Historic pieces like this resonate as there is an appreciation for all that was done in the past, to make our present a better place. This is one of those stories, and the rippling struggles of this family.
Culture Study: Preparing for the Death of Your Parents
I listened to this one with my mum while running errands in the car. Anne Helen Petersen talks with Becky Robison, author of My Parents Are Dead, about preparing for the eventual, inevitable death of our parents, and the checklist of life admin you’re left to navigate while grieving the people who raised you.
Nobody would call this subject entertaining, and that’s what Culture Study does well. It takes topics that tug at the heart and that lie on the fringe, and makes them approachable. For us, it opened a door: what my mum would have done differently when her parents died, and what her own wishes are. That’s a conversation that is hard to start cold.
None of these stories is about my life, exactly. But each one names something I hadn’t found words for: that you can mourn a home, a marriage, a career, a road not taken, a version of yourself, while everyone in the picture is still alive. The stories don’t fix that. They make room for it.