I had spent years learning how to command a room. Then my mother died, and suddenly I wanted to disappear into one.
When Everyone Expects You to Be the Strong One in Grief
By the time my mother died, I knew how to perform.
Not perform grief.
Perform, period.
I had been an actor.
A speaker.
A writer.
A producer.
A public personality.
I had stood in front of rooms full of strangers and made them laugh.
I had done book readings.
I had worked stages.
I had hosted things.
I had spoken professionally.
I had built a speakers bureau.
I had been what we used to call Twitter famous, which now sounds like saying you were a big deal on MySpace.
But at the time, it meant people knew me.
Online.
In Chicago.
In the salon industry.
In the strange little world of Mafia Hairdresser.
And then my mother died.
Suddenly, all those skills I had spent years developing became something I didn’t want anyone to expect from me.
I Knew People Would Be Watching
My family knew me as the public one.
The talker.
The storyteller.
The one who could walk into a room and work it.
The one who could make conversation with almost anyone.
Royalty.
Children.
Politicians.
Hairdressers.
A room full of dancing gays.
I was versatile.
So when my mother’s funeral approached, I had a strange and very specific fear:
Everyone was going to look at me.
Not because they were narcissistically obsessed with me.
Because I was her son.
Because my mother and I were close.
Because my family knew our history.
Because I had been writing publicly about what was happening.
Because I was the one who normally knew what to say.
And because people tend to look toward the person who appears most capable when nobody knows what to do.
That person had often been me.
I did not want the job.
LISTEN: Jon-David’s outrageous serialIzed podcast of mobsters, Hollywood, hair salon life, rave culure, true crime, and unbelievable stories inspired by a life that rarely went according to plan.
Start listening to
THE MAFIA HAIRDRESSER CHRONICLES →
I Wanted the Funeral to Be About Her
This seems obvious now.
It was my mother’s funeral.
Of course it should have been about her.
But I worried that my public personality might somehow hijack the room.
I worried people would come toward me first.
Console me first.
Ask me what happened.
Ask me how I was doing.
Expect me to speak.
Expect me to make everybody comfortable.
I didn’t want that.
I wanted my dad to receive the condolences.
He had lost his wife of fifty years.
I wanted my brother to be hugged.
He had lost his mother too.
I wanted my aunts, uncles and cousins to grieve.
I wanted Marie to be the center of the room.
For once, I wanted Jon-David to stand somewhere in the back.
THE STORIES THAT STARTED IT ALL
Mafia Hairdresser, & The Glow Stick Gods – two outrageous novels of mobsters, Hollywood, celebrities, cocaine, “Tina”, rave culture, and survival. Inspired by Jon-David’s unbelievable life.
Discover the Books →
That’s Harder Than It Sounds When You’ve Built a Public Personality
There’s an odd thing that happens when you’ve spent a lot of your life being “on.”
People begin to expect the version of you they know.
The funny one.
The articulate one.
The outrageous one.
The strong one.
The one who has a story.
The one who makes everyone else feel comfortable.
And sometimes you’re happy to give them that person.
It’s real.
I’m not pretending when I’m funny.
I’m not pretending when I’m social.
I’m not pretending when I command a room.
That’s me.
But it’s not all of me.
And grief is one of those times when the public version and private version of a person can collide.
The Strong Person Is Often Assigned More Work
Families do this without meaning to.
Somebody becomes:
The organized one.
The medical one.
The financial one.
The calm one.
The one who makes the calls.
The one who knows what Mom wanted.
The one who deals with the funeral home.
The one who talks to the relatives.
The one who explains things to everyone else.
Sometimes that person is chosen because they’re good at it.
Sometimes they’re chosen because everybody else is falling apart.
And sometimes they simply volunteer before realizing what they’ve volunteered for.
I have a long history of stepping into the competent-person slot.
That doesn’t mean I’m always competent.
It means I’m often convincing.
There’s a difference.
Connect with Us on Social Media
YES. IT’S REALLY CALLED
HOW I KILLED MY MOTHER
A funny, painful, and unexpectedly hopeful memoir podcast about mothers, sons, guilt, grief, forgiveness, and the unfinished relationships we carry with us – sometimes long after the people we love are gone.
LISTEN TO HOW I KILLED MY MOTHER→
Grief Does Not Care About Your Skill Set
You can be an excellent public speaker and still have nothing to say.
You can be great at comforting clients and have no idea how to comfort yourself.
You can be the person everyone calls in a crisis and still secretly want someone else to make every decision for you.
You can know how to control a room and desperately wish the room would stop looking at you.
Grief has no respect for credentials.
It doesn’t care that you’ve been trained.
It doesn’t care that you’re normally funny.
It doesn’t care that you’ve handled difficult things before.
It doesn’t care that people think you’re strong.
Sometimes the strong person is only strong because nobody has relieved them of duty yet.
I Was Already Performing in My Head
Here’s the embarrassing part.
Nobody had actually demanded anything from me yet.
I was anticipating it.
I was rehearsing the funeral before it happened.
How do I stand?
Who do I talk to?
Should I speak?
What will everybody think of me?
How emotional is too emotional?
How unemotional looks cold?
Do I hug everyone?
Do I stay near Dad?
Do I make sure my brother is okay?
How do I make sure nobody thinks I’m making this about myself?
And then I caught myself.
Was worrying that I might make my mother’s funeral about me already making my mother’s funeral about me?
Fantastic.
Grief, now with bonus narcissism.
Public People Still Have Private Pain
I think this is something we forget about anyone with a visible personality.
Performers.
Business owners.
Teachers.
Clergy.
Managers.
Stylists.
Influencers.
The person in every family who can always be counted on.
We’re accustomed to seeing what they do for other people.
So we assume they know how to do it for themselves.
They don’t always.
I spent decades behind a salon chair hearing other people’s problems.
I became very good at listening.
I could reassure people.
Make them laugh.
Put something in perspective.
And then there are moments in life when none of those tools work on you.
Because you already know all the comforting phrases.
You’re the one who has said them.
Maybe That’s Why I Didn’t Want to Speak
A speech would have been easy.
Technically.
I know how to tell a story.
I could have told funny stories about Mom.
Touching stories.
I could have made people laugh and cry exactly where I wanted them to.
That’s what a trained speaker does.
And that’s precisely what frightened me.
I didn’t want to produce the emotional experience of my mother’s funeral.
I wanted to have one.
There is a difference.
Sometimes Grief Should Be Badly Performed
I think we put strange pressure on ourselves around death.
We want to do it correctly.
Say the right thing.
Have the meaningful service.
Choose the right photograph.
Tell the right story.
Play the right music.
Cry enough.
Don’t cry too much.
Be strong.
Fall apart, but appropriately.
Make the dead person proud.
What if there is no correct performance?
What if grief is supposed to be messy?
Maybe you give a brilliant eulogy.
Maybe you can’t speak.
Maybe you laugh at something inappropriate.
Maybe you cry in the restroom.
Maybe you feel numb.
Maybe you’re hungry.
Maybe you’re thinking about where you parked.
Human beings are extraordinarily ordinary during extraordinary moments.
I find that comforting.
The Funeral Wasn’t Mine to Control Anyway
This was perhaps the lesson I needed most.
I had spent days trying to figure out how not to control the event.
Which, naturally, was another attempt to control the event.
Then the day came.
People gathered.
They told stories.
They comforted my father.
They comforted my brother.
They comforted me.
My mother was remembered.
The room became whatever the room needed to become.
Without my producing it.
Imagine that.
The world managed to continue without Jon-David stage-managing the emotion.
Humbling.
The Role I Actually Needed to Play
Son.
That’s it.
Not speaker.
Not writer.
Not Mafia Hairdresser.
Not social-media personality.
Not the funny one.
Not the guy who could command the room.
Just:
Marie’s son.
I had spent years creating different versions of myself for different stages of life.
But grief stripped all of them away.
At my mother’s funeral, the only identity that mattered was the first one she’d ever given me.
Her child.
The Strong One Needs Permission Too
If you’re the strong person in your family, you may know what I’m talking about.
People trust you.
That’s beautiful.
People rely on you.
That’s meaningful.
But being capable can become a trap if you start believing capability means you don’t get to be cared for.
You do.
You don’t have to host your own grief.
You don’t have to make everybody comfortable.
You don’t have to know what to say.
You don’t have to turn pain into wisdom before you’re ready.
You don’t have to perform.
Sometimes the most honest thing the strong person can say is:
I don’t know what to do either.
I Still Perform My Life
I haven’t become a shrinking violet.
Obviously.
I’m still writing about everything.
I’m planning podcasts.
Videos.
Blogs.
Stories.
I’m still turning life into material.
That’s one of the ways I understand what happens to me.
But I’m beginning to recognize the difference between telling the story later and performing it while it’s happening.
Sometimes a moment deserves to remain unproduced.
No audience.
No lesson.
No clever line.
No content.
Just experience.
My mother’s funeral taught me that.
For one day, I didn’t need to be the person who knew how to hold the room.
I just needed to stand in it.
And miss my mother.
Jon-David is the author of Mafia Hairdresser and The Glow Stick Gods and creator and host of the memoir podcast How I Killed My Mother. He writes about grief, family, reinvention, relationships, aging and the strange difference between living a life and performing one.
Listen to How I Killed My Mother
How I Killed My Mother is a memoir podcast about mothers and sons, depression and hope, family and forgiveness, caregiving, spirituality, humor, death, and the uncomfortable business of discovering who we really are.
The podcast also became the foundation for my upcoming memoir, How I Killed My Mother.
This isn’t a story about having all the answers.
It’s about what happened when I finally started asking myself the questions.
If you’re standing at the bottom of something right now, I can’t tell you how long your climb will be.
I can only tell you that I’ve stood at the bottom, too.
Climb with me.
— Jon-David
0 Comments