Episode 14: What The Media Gets Wrong About Grief

We learn what grief "should" look like long before we ever experience it. Through films, TV, music and even adverts.

But when grief arrives... it doesn't follow a script.

In this episode I talk about the gap between how grief is portrayed in the media and what it actually feels like to live it. It's messy, quiet, repetitive, and very real.

From cinematic storylines to supermarket breakdowns, this one is about unlearning the polished version of grief and making space for truth.

I also mention the website 'Does The Dog Die' which is a resource that helps you check for difficult or triggering content in films and shows before you watch:

https://www.doesthedogdie.com/

If your grief doesn't look like that movies, you're not doing it wrong. You're just living the version no one writes scripts for.

☕️🖤

Transcript

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Hello and welcome back to the Early Morning Coffee Club, the podcast where grief is intense, humor is finely ground, and strength sneaks up on you like a double shot. Before we start today, I want you to think about something for a moment. Before you ever experience grief in your own life, where exactly did you learn what grief was supposed to look like? Was it from someone you knew? Was it from somewhere else? Because for most of us, the first lessons of grief don't come from real life. They come from stories, movies, songs, TV shows, adverts, little moments on screens that quietly teach us how grief is supposed to behave. How long sadness is allowed to last, what healing is supposed to look like. And the strange thing is, most of us don't realise we've been taught those lessons until grief arrives and we suddenly discover that real grief looks nothing like the version we were shown. Before we lose someone, grief in the media tends to follow a very tidy formula. Someone dies, there's a beautiful funeral, a tasteful amount of crying, some meaningful staring out of rainy windows, sad music playing, maybe there's even a montage, and then somewhere around the 90 minute mark, the grieving character has a breakthrough. They smile again, they move forward, the credits roll, the audience cries, and that's it. End of the story, always a happy ending. But real grief isn't a storyline. It doesn't follow a script, it definitely doesn't wrap itself up neatly in under two hours. Films, especially love stories, turn grief into something poetic. Think about the movie P.S. I Love You with Gerard Butler. I remember watching it years ago and thinking it was the most romantic thing imaginable. Your husband dies, but he leaves you a series of letters, instructions, little adventures, messages guiding you through grief, each one arriving at exactly the right moment. It's tidy, beautiful, hopeful, and at the time it felt comforting. But after living through loss, it lands very, very differently. Because, as I found out, grief doesn't arrive with a carefully planned roadmap. No one sent me instructions. There's no magical sequence of letters arriving to guide me gently towards healing. There's just chaos, paperwork, shock, exhaustion, the brutal quiet of someone not being there. And sometimes you realise that what the movie sold as romantic was actually just the way of making grief easier to watch. Another film that people often call beautiful is Ghost. The idea that someone you love dies but stays nearby, watching over you, communicating through physics, helping you solve unfinished business. It's emotional and dramatic and comforting, but again it creates this idea that death is somehow still interactive, that love keeps appearing in obvious, visible ways, and in reality, grief is often defined by the opposite. The silence, the absence, the unanswered questions. Even Disney teaches us about grief as children. Think about The Lion King, one of Oscar's favourite movies. Simba tragically loses his father in one of the most heartbreaking scenes in animation. But the emotional arc is still neat. There's a clear villain, someone to blame, a very clear turning point, a moment of acceptance where Mufasa appears in the clouds and tells Simba to remember who he is. It's powerful storytelling, but real grief rarely arrives with a ghostly father in the sky offering life advice. If only TV shows can do the same thing. There's often a grieving character for a few episodes, maybe a season, but eventually the storyline moves on. Unless the show is specifically about grief. One of the few series that actually gets closer to this reality is Afterlife by Ricky Gervais. The first time Alex and I watched it together, I enjoyed it, but I remember thinking the main character who's a grieving husband was actually a bit irritating. He was angry, sharp and difficult, so self-destructive. And I remember thinking, wow, he's quite unlikable. But then I watched it again after Alex died. And suddenly it felt very different. Because what I realized the second time around was this. He wasn't actually annoying. He was accurate. Grief often makes people messy, impatient, detached. It doesn't always turn people into soft poetic versions of themselves. Sometimes it just makes you tired and blunt and trying to survive each day. Songs do this too. Music absolutely loves dramatic heartbreak. Think about songs like Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton or My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion from the movie Titanic. They're powerful, beautiful, epic love songs. Grief becomes this sweeping emotional experience, grand, almost cinematic, but real grief is often so much quieter. Sometimes it's just making dinner for one less person, sleeping on one side of the bed, hearing a song in a supermarket and abandoning your trolley halfway down the aisle three. It's small moments, not orchestras. And then there are the adverts, which might actually be the strangest place that grief appears. I remember seeing the Scottish Widow's television advert when I was a child, and if you grew up in the UK, you'll probably remember it too. This young, beautiful woman walking slowly across the screen, dressed in a long black cape, elegant, mysterious, the widow. And even as a child I remember feeling confused because the word widow sounded heavy, old, sad. I imagined someone much more fragile, someone at the end of their life. But on the screen was this young, striking woman almost making widowhood glamorous, completely untouchable, stylized. It was the first time I realized something strange. Even widowhood could be turned into an image, a brand and a symbol, not a lived experience. And here's another thing the media rarely shows. In films when someone is grieving, the world sort of pauses. People get space, quiet, time to process. They sit alone staring out of windows while rain dramatically falls outside. Sad piano music plays. Real life does not do that. Real life keeps moving, sometimes in the most ridiculous ways. I remember this one time I was in the car having one of those exact moments. You know, the ones like I said, sad music on, driving somewhere, just letting the tears fall. I was properly in it. Full emotional soundtrack moment, very cinematic. And then the song finished, my phone was on shuffle, and the next track that came on was Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. Suddenly the speakers are blasting head, shoulders, knees and toes, and from the back seat I hear Oscar immediately start singing along. Full enthusiasm, full performance, and in that moment I had to wipe away my tears, clear my throat, and join in like nothing had happened. Because that's the reality of grieving when you're also parenting. You can go from crying over the love of your life to singing head, shoulders, knees and toes in about three seconds flat. There's no cinematic pause, no dramatic music fading out, just life continuing around you. And honestly, sometimes those ridiculous interruptions are what keep you afloat. Because grief isn't a perfectly crafted scene. It's crying in the front seat of your car while simultaneously doing toddler karaoke. It's laughing and then feeling guilty for laughing. It's forgetting for half a second that someone is gone. It's filing the paperwork while your brain feels like a fog. It's crying in supermarket aisles. None of that makes for very cinematic storytelling. But you know what? It's the truth. The real problem with these portrayals isn't that they're emotional. Emotion isn't the issue. The issue is expectations. These stories quietly teach us what grief is supposed to look like. So when grief arrives, messy, repetitive, exhausting, people think they're doing it wrong. They think, why am I still struggling? Why am I not stronger? Why doesn't this look like the movies? But the truth is the movies were never meant to prepare us. They were meant to entertain us. A really useful resource for anyone who's finding certain movie scenes emotionally overwhelming is the website Does the Dog Die. It's a community-driven website that tracks potential distressing content in films, TV shows, books, and games. While the name focuses on a specific trope, the site actually covers a wide range of triggers. Everything from death of a person or animals to illness, grief, violence, or other sensitive demes. For someone who's grieving, this can be incredibly helpful. Instead of going into a film blind and being caught off guard by a painful scene, you can quickly look up the title on this website and see clear, spoiler-light warnings about what happens. That sense of control, knowing what you might be exposed to, can make a big difference when emotions are already raw. It also lets you make choices that support your healing. Maybe you're not ready to watch stories involving loss, or maybe you are ready but want to prepare yourself mentally. Either way, the site helps you engage with media in your own terms rather than being unexpectedly triggered. I'll put a link to the website in this caption. Oscar. And sometimes those stories can be moving, but you have to remember they aren't the full picture. Real grief is often much quieter than that. Sometimes it looks like making dinner while you're missing someone. Sometimes it's laughing at something silly and then suddenly remembering who isn't there to laugh with you. Sometimes it's just carrying someone in your thoughts while you go about an ordinary day. So I want you to know something important. There's no right way to grieve. If you cry, that's okay. If you don't cry, that's okay too. If you laugh, if you feel angry, if you feel nothing at all for a while, all of this is completely normal. Grief isn't something you get over. It's something you slowly learn to carry, and the reason it hurts so much is actually something quite beautiful in itself. It hurts because love was there first, and love doesn't ever really disappear. Real grief doesn't follow a narrative arc. There's no clear beginning, middle, and end. There's no dramatic turning point where everything suddenly makes sense again. Healing isn't cinematic. It's gradual, uneven, often invisible. And sometimes the bravest thing someone grieving does in a day is simply getting out of bed. So if grief in your life doesn't look like the movies, if it's messier, longer, quieter, harder, remember you aren't doing it wrong. You're just experiencing the version that never makes it onto the screen, the real one. And if the media ever does get grief right, it's usually not in the big dramatic moments, it's in the small ones. The silence, the empty chair, the ordinary moments that suddenly feel different. That's where grief actually lives. And the thing about these moments is they're not dramatic or poetic. No one writes movie scenes about crying in a supermarket or arguing with a telephone provider about cancellation policies. But those tiny moments, that's where grief actually happens. In the ordinary Tuesday afternoons. This has been the Early Morning Coffee Club. Thank you for listening. I'm sorry you're here, but I'm glad we're here together. I'll see you next week.