Any kind of grieving that is not allowed causes a break. In our culture, grieving in public is not encouraged, but in other cultures, it is done publicly. Some cultures have walls where people can cry. We don't have that. We have theatre where there's always the chance for you to face things within yourself.
No one can tell you what to expect or can offer a guide to grief. Because every relationship is so unique, no two people grieve the same way. And you have no idea how you are going to grieve till you are grieving.
'Lose My Cool' is the second track on my EP dedicated to a stage in the grieving process. This track represents anger. I really bottled a lot up after my mother passed, and one day, I couldn't handle it anymore and just exploded on all of my friends and family. It was a very passive way of dealing with things, not very healthy.
When my brother died in 1966, my father began a grieving process that lasted almost twenty-five years. For all that time, he suffered from chronic, debilitating headaches. I took him to some of the country's major medical facilities, but no one could cure him of his pain.
Mom was so funny and loving to us kids. She was our first audience. When my dad died, I was suddenly alone in the house with her because my two older brothers were away at college. I was the man of the house, and she was the grieving woman.
We've enshrined the purity, sanctity, value, and importance of bringing children into the world, yet we don't discuss death. There used to be an enshrined period where mourning was a necessary part of going through the process of grieving; death wasn't considered morbid or antisocial. But that's totally gone.
When people are grieving, it's kind of like a storm, and you need something to grab onto, but often you have to brave it on your own.
Especially in the Western world, so much of our cultural ideas about grieving is about us, and I think it's important to get beyond that sometimes.
What a difficult time that must have been for my mother, only twenty-four years old, grieving for her mother, giving birth to her own daughter.
I think ancient cultures incorporated death into the experience of life in a more natural way than we have done. In our obsessive focus on youth, on celebrity, our denial of death makes it harder for people who are grieving to find a place for that grief.
