We lost a F.R.I.E.N.D...

The strange reality of parasocial grief...

I have a tension headache, living deep within my jaw. It lingers, following me, as I try – in vain – to outrun it. Distract it. Keep moving forwards as it dissolves away. So far, it’s ignoring all of my attempts. It’s a stubborn bugger.

Whenever I need to switch off my life, the emotions calcifying in my bones, I turn on Comedy Central. Watch FRIENDS until I fall asleep. I can laugh at that show, even when I’m crying. I can summon scenes from it, play them out within my head, and break out into a smile. It’s what I did yesterday, pulled my hot-rocked raspberry pink blanket around my head and watched the gang. Ross was still seeing his childhood doctor, Phoebe met Mike and Chandler was leaving for Tulsa. And… bam. The headache relinquished, for a while. I was asleep.

This morning, around 7am, I woke to the news that Matthew Perry has died. I’m numb, often, to celebrity deaths, I don’t think I’ve ever cried at one. But just because I’m not crying, that doesn’t mean I don’t feel sad at this news, that I’m not thinking about him and those who loved him. That I don’t feel grief.

We can feel a little silly, feeling sad when a celebrity dies. Maybe that “we” wasn’t right, I can’t presume how you’re feeling. I do, I feel a little silly. I didn’t know this man, with a marshmallow soft smile, and floppy brown hair.  Yet, in a way, I did. His sarcastic tone has been part of the soundtrack to my life.

When I examined the grief that followed the Queen’s death, I turned to Mary-Frances O Connor’s book, The Grieving Brain, where she has a whole chapter on what is known as parasocial grief.

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided one, think kissing the poster of your favourite pop star before going to sleep, or being heavily invested in a celebrity or influencers life. It’s feeling like you know someone, even though you only ever see them in 2D. When we love someone, our brain forms an attachment bond with them, “invisible tethers that motivate us to seek out our loved ones, to derive comfort from their presence.” Grief comes about when that bond is severed. When we can no longer connect to the person we’ve bonded to. Of course, the grief is greater when we have bonded, physically, to a person and they’re no longer in our lives but we may, in some cases, still form a bond to a person we have only ever viewed through a screen.

“We have a surprising amount of access to what famous personalities portray as their lifestyles and beliefs, their likes and dislikes,” O Connor writes. “This kind of information is not necessarily sufficient for forming an attachment bond however, if we think about what the prerequisites for attachment are, our relationships with [famous people] may still meet the criteria to some degree. First, the person must meet our attachment needs. This means that the person is available when we need someone to turn to in our darkest hour.”

For so many years, I have found a soft, mind numbing comfort in Friends re-runs. I’m not alone in this, during lockdown, streams of the show shot up as we sought out its familiarity, the frozen snapshot into a life we almost felt a part of. I remember going to a FRIENDS experience once, and stepping onto the set, within the purple walls and feeling as if I’d visited one of my old house shares. Feeling as if, somehow, I was home.

When the reunion was aired, and they showed interviews with fans across the world, some recounted times when they were flailing, lost in the deep dark depths of depression and the show soothed them. The gang became their company, they were in the company of their friends. So, we will have turned to Matthew Perry, to Chandler, in our darkest of hours. The comfort needed for that attachment bond, for many, exists.

From this, I want to say, I’m not being silly and you’re not being silly if you feel sad at this news. He meant something to us, he was there when we needed him. We wish this man who made so many people happy could have done the same for himself.

But then I also want to add, I worry we try to find labels and reasoning for why we feel things so often these days. We plot out the planets, try and place ourselves in whatever mercury is in retrograde, or we (if this applies) look to our period-tracking apps and pinpoint our mood on our cycle. There are so many different labels, for different sorts of grief, and we search for ourselves within them. If this helps you, then that’s fine. But I’m beginning to recognise that I don’t need to search for a reason behind a feeling. I don’t need to Google various studies or interview experts in order for how I feel to be valid, and real.

So, today, I feel like I lost a friend. It’s OK if you feel that way too.

Thanks for reading. I’m sorry I missed last week’s newsletter. I was in Tokyo! I’m also quite overwhelmed at the moment, with various personal and work things going on, but I appreciate you all so much for reading and I hope everyone is doing OK? The world feels very harsh at the moment, it’s important we try and treat ourselves softly. Sending love and please do comment and let me know how you are. I love reading all your comments.