Let Andrew Garfield Explain Grief to You

Andrew Garfield has been on a media blitz lately in promotion of his new movie We Live in Time. But only Garfield could make a press tour as profound as a poem.

Garfield’s mother, Lynn, passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2019. He talked about his grieving process with Anderson Cooper on a recent episode of “All There Is.” I encourage you to listen to their conversation in its entirety.

“The longing and the grief, fully inhabiting it and feeling it, is the only way I can really feel close to her again. The grief and the loss is the only root to the vitality of being alive. The wound is the only root to the gift,” Garfield said.

We’ve all known or will know grief; such is the human condition. And we love talking about it and how to handle it, but I’ve never heard it put so plainly. We grieve in order to love those we’ve lost because it’s the only way to love them once they’re gone. We have to push on the bruise in order for it to heal. It fucking sucks. But it’s so true.

I’ve known grief—not like Garfield’s—but I’ve resisted it for a long time. When someone important to me died, I avoided grieving them. The idea of feeling it was too scary, so I simply didn’t. Cooper did this too, when his father died, and as he explained to Garfield, “By doing that I’ve not allowed myself to experience great sadness but also not allowed myself to experience great joy, because I don’t think you can have one without the other.”

We’ll do anything to avoid sadness, and who can blame us? But sadness exists on the spectrum of emotion alongside joy and anger and fear and love. But as Garfield told Elmo, “That sadness—it’s kind of a gift. It’s kind of a lovely thing to feel, in a way, because it means you really loved somebody when you miss them.”