Laurel Braitman’s “What Looks Like Bravery”: An Intimate Portrait of the Impact of Early Parent Loss Over the Decades
I can’t think of a better way to kick off Children’s Grief Awareness Month than to share my recent discussion with Laurel Braitman, author of the new memoir “What Looks Like Bravery: An Epic Journey Through Loss to Love.” Laurel’s dad died when she was 17 after being diagnosed with an aggressive metastatic cancer when she was very young.
Longtime listeners of the Widowed Parent Podcast will recall that I’ve often mentioned what a privilege it is to speak with grown-up grieving kids and to hear firsthand their experiences and reflections after losing a parent at a young age. Discussions with Hope Edelman, Claire Bidwell Smith, Jon Lefrandt, and so many others come to mind.
What Laurel gives us in her memoir is an incredibly intimate portrait of her life. She lets us inside, and she allows us to see how grief has affected one now-grown-up grieving child over the decades.
Laurel’s book and my discussion with her are full of beautiful insights – and I really can’t say enough good things about her book. I don’t usually cry when reading books, but wow, I had a little trouble seeing the words on the last few pages through the tears that were welling up.
Following are a few highlights from my interview with Laurel Braitman, lightly edited and condensed for clarity and space. You can listen to the full discussion on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jenny Lisk: You blamed yourself for your dad's death, “because I had needed someone to blame.” I thought that was really an important, interesting, profound point.
Laurel Braitman: It's not that I think I should have had a cure for metastatic cancer. It's rather that we search for somebody to blame because admitting that there was no reason for the terrible thing to happen is too terrifying of a world to live in. So we blame ourselves, I believe, to blame something other than the mayhem and the chaos and the injustice that is often being a human being. To admit that this can happen at any moment at all, for no reason, because no one deserved it, and therefore, it could happen again – it’s so awful. It's better instead, even though it's also uncomfortable, to say, I'm bad, I did something wrong.
We search for somebody to blame because admitting that there was no reason for the terrible thing to happen is too terrifying of a world to live in.
Jenny Lisk: You were driving up the coast after a bad breakup and an episode of This American Life came on the radio. Can you tell us about that?
Laurel Braitman: I was driving away from a really painful breakup with my girlfriend at the time and just a hot mess really, even though professionally I was thriving, and I turned on the radio and I heard this episode of This American Life about the Sharing Place in Utah, which was a grief support center for kids. And the reporter, Jonathan Goldstein, asked the director, what's at stake if a child doesn't get grief support. And the director said, well, you know, intimacy can be hard for them and they can run away. And I was literally driving like 94 miles an hour away from someone who loved me. And it was so obvious. I pulled the car over and I started Googling “kid grief support near me.” I called the director of Josie's place, which is in San Francisco, which is a wonderful grief support center for kids. And I tried to talk about myself as a journalist and say, you know, I really want to enroll in your program as a geriatric teenager. And she was like, that's weird. But come and you can train to be a facilitator. So that's what I did. And then I also visited the Dougy Center in Portland. And what I really wanted was to be locked inside the volcano room because I'd never heard of anything that magical. It's basically a padded room. It has really bright colors with an embroidered volcano on one wall and a smushy floor and it's full of pillows and you can just go in there and just lose it. And I loved the idea of that. I'm a “good girl,” and my coping mechanism has always been performing. So the idea of going into a place where I could do whatever I want, and the whole idea was to kind of lose it, just sounded so delightful to me. But then I got there and I was too embarrassed to ask if I could get locked in there alone.
Jenny Lisk: At your high school graduation, your mom pulls out a present, and she says, this is from Dad. He had died six months earlier. And you kind of freaked out, I think. Can you tell us a little bit about this experience that you had?
Laurel Braitman: So my dad bought me a fountain pen and put it in a box and wrote a note and said, Laurel, I love you. Use this to sign your first book one day. It was an incredible gift and it survived when I lost everything in a wildfire. It's one of the few things I actually have to this day, but it also hurt, for a number of reasons. One being that I knew it was the last gift he would ever give me. And once I opened it, it meant he was fully gone. The fact that he wasn't giving it to me himself – that was a kind of finality I don't think I was ready for. And then secondly, what kind of 17 year old gets a letter from her dead dad with a pen and then is like, well, I must become a writer now. And I did. And so that's what I mean about untangling their wishes for us from our wishes for ourselves. I wanted to be a writer and what a gift to believe that I could do it before I could believe I could do it. It's not like we knew writers. I'd never met a writer. That seemed like saying I wanted to go to Mars, you know? Yet he believed in my preposterous dream. And that's such a huge gift and such privilege, frankly. So that was a present, but also, maybe he just could have given me the pen and said, I want you to have this, so it wasn't a to do list I need to spend the next 20 years working on.
Jenny Lisk: If you could say one thing to adults who have a grieving child in their life, what would you say to them?
Laurel Braitman: Tell them that you don't know what they're thinking and that they may have lots of theories that they don't even know how to explain to you, but it's very important that they know that they did nothing wrong. Even if they feel like they did something wrong, that any shame they might have or regret or negative feeling is just proof they loved the person and they wish they weren't gone, not that they messed up.
Editor’s note: Find Laurel’s book, “What Looks Like Bravery,” at Amazon.com, Bookshop.org, or Barnes & Noble. You can listen to the full discussion with Laurel Braitman on the Widowed Parent Podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
