Grief constantly takes on different shapes and forms. It is never quite what you expect

I recently had to attend a funeral online via live-stream. I was staying with my aunt in the UK and we were not able to make it back in time to attend the service at home. So we set up the video on her phone, leaning it up against the vase on her kitchen table.

She made us each a cup of tea and served a slice of leftover birthday cake that her neighbour had dropped over that morning.

As my fork sunk into the double-chocolate fudge, I was overwhelmed by the absurdity of the entire scene. “Is it bad etiquette to eat cake as you watch a funeral?” I asked. She nearly choked on the claggy buttercream. “I did wonder as I sliced it if it was disrespectful,” she admitted, through a fit of giggles. I was pleased to hear her laugh, she had lost a close friend and was troubled by the fact that she could not make it home.

“He’d love it – he’d get a kick out of the pair of us here. What are we like?” she asked with a shake of the head and a double-edged smile.

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During the service, she had to answer the door to the postman and I was repeatedly distracted by the headlines in the newspaper I was using as a placemat. I wondered if the kitchen was too trivial a place to observe such a momentous event, or if it was just ordinary enough to capture all the tiny ways in which a loss can overturn one’s life. It made me ask all kinds of existential questions about grief. About what is in a life and what is the appropriate way to mark one, or its passage into whatever awaits us on the other side.

I was reminded of all this at the Remembrance Run in the Phoenix Park this past Sunday. My family and I first attended the event in 2013, but it was launched in 2012 with a small but committed crowd of a few hundred showing up for the 5km route. Over the last decade, I have watched as thousands more have turned out year on year to remember those they have lost.

My feelings on the event have changed a lot over the years. In my early teens, I rolled my eyes at my dad’s enthusiasm for it; I was frustrated that I had anyone to remember. In my college years, I did not see the benefit of being dragged out on a Sunday morning to mark another year without my mother; it felt useless. More recently, however, I have started to value the space created by the event; one in which I have a chance to think about my mother and my grandparents in a way that I do not in day-to-day life, and on a day that is not charged with the expectations of anniversaries, birthdays or Christmas.

This only struck me last year during the moment’s silence at the start line. Some people bowed their heads, others looked up at a miraculously sunny sky, and everyone thought about loved ones they had lost. What was moving about the profound silence was, somehow, everything that interrupted it – everything that made it ordinary. A child screaming, a dog barking, the steward’s walkie talkie crackling, a brother tickling a sister to make her laugh, their mother shushing them to be quiet.

The event is incredibly well organised, but there is nothing manicured about it. There are no rules as to what “remembering” should look like. There is the Remembrance Wall near the start line that people can sign in memory of those they have lost, and there is a screen that plays a reel of images of them too. But there is also a DJ blaring music through the speakers, a choir singing on stage and a coffee stand that people can get so distracted by they miss the call for the start of the run.

The hour before the run starts, people are milling around. You witness families excitedly reuniting, friends laughing at the sight of each other in their running garb, others nattering over their coffee. You also see people quietly sign the Remembrance Wall and others contemplatively watch the screen playing images of “those we’ve lost”. Some cry too.

You may also encounter, as I did last Sunday, a small child walking by with muck on her face, hands and her once pristine butter-yellow tracksuit bottoms. I stifled a laugh as she jumped into some more mud and did another tumble. It was hard to watch, but even more difficult to look away. This drama unfolded as I chatted with Bernie McDermott, doing the run for a seventh year. She told me of the comfort she finds in the “camaraderie” of the event, in seeing “everybody smiling – well, everybody crying but smiling at the same time”.

This is the overriding feeling among people I talk to throughout the morning: relief. Relief at not having to get grief “right”, at being able to sit in all its messiness – smiles, tears, snot, mud and all – in a crowd of strangers. No one is expected to button up their feelings in a tidy black suit or a sombre handshake here.

When I talk with sisters Carol, Linda and Michelle, who are running in memory of their nephew Conor, who passed away last May, they agree that the event “is a nice excuse to get together”, as much as anything else. “We’re all going back to Linda’s for breakfast after,” Carol says, gesturing to her sister beside me. “You are, are you now?” Linda retorts. “Well, she doesn’t know it yet!” Michelle exclaims, and they all laugh.

Funnily, this relaxed feeling is what allows big emotions to bubble to the surface – often catching people off guard. “I didn’t expect to cry!” Kate Farrelly exclaims as she wipes her eyes. Her sister Alison laughs with her, explaining that it is their first time at the event. They heard about it through their running club and decided to run in memory of their parents and their neighbour Seán, who was “like a second dad” to them. “We’re kind of used to talking about it since our dad died 15 years ago but being here today, the emotion just swells up,” Kate says.

“I think it’s just emotional to see all these other people have the same feelings. People don’t realise that yes, grief is such sadness, but it can also be happiness or even jealousy – here you can know that other people experience that mix of emotions as well with you.”

Miriam Mooney, running alongside her sister Gillian in memory of their mother, is similarly moved by this collective spirit. “There’s something special in the air”, she says, looking around at the building crowd. “I suppose it’s love, isn’t it? You feel it.” I suppose, indeed. And is that not what makes grief so contradictory at every turn? That it is love’s shadow?

I planned to talk to more strangers about this as I made my way around the route, but I ended up spending the 5km chatting with my younger brother about it. We reflected together on what the run means to us – and how our sense of loss may have differed over the last decade. He admitted the run was not as significant to him as it was to me. His grief, he said, had never felt isolating or lonely. If anything, it had brought him closer to people in his life. I was surprised to hear this but then realised we had never actually spoken about our shared loss in these terms.

I suppose I mention this because it epitomises what I came to understand about grief through my different conversations last Sunday. Which is the simple but always unsettling fact that it constantly takes on different shapes and forms, it is never quite what you expected, and just as you think you have it figured out, it evades you in a new way. Or, as Kate Farrelly more tidily observed in our conversation, that “it’s like a run – there’s highs and lows, it goes up and down and no two days are ever the same”.

Emerging from all of this is a sense that how one remembers – how one mourns – is as much a testament to a loved one’s life as the memory itself. So no, grief does not always look like devastation, and it does not always look like enjoying a run around a park on a wet November morning. But sometimes it does. And sometimes it is crying to a nosy writer who you have never met before, while other times it is joining a running club with your sister. Sometimes it is inviting yourself to your sister’s home for an impromptu breakfast and sometimes it is eating chocolate cake with a cup of tea, holding your mother’s sister’s hand under the kitchen table.

[ Challenging myths about . . . grief ]

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