On September 9 I was in Boston for the first night of Sara Bareilles’s Good Grief tour.
She came out and told a full theater that they were trying something. And they didn’t know yet if it was going to work.
I love going to concerts. I’ve been to hundreds. And I have seen everyone from Busta Rhymes and Bob Dylan to Indigo Girls and Guns ‘n Roses to Ziggy Marley and Tool. I have seen Pearl Jam probably 15 times, including traveling to see them in Poland.
Walking into that theater I was giddy. Just as excited as I was seeing Pearl Jam in Poland.
On the surface the two have nothing in common. A rock band from Seattle playing stadiums. A woman at a piano in a theater. Different sound, different crowd, different volume, different everything.
Eddie Vedder and Sara Bareilles are two of my favorite songwriters. I find a tremendous amount of meaning in their poetry.
What I didn’t expect was that the experience would be so similar.
It was cathartic. Both of them take you through a whole range of emotions in one night. They make you feel. They make you laugh. They make you cry.
Here’s what I think is going on.
At almost every Pearl Jam show, Eddie Vedder reads a letter from a fac. And almost every time, it’s about grief.
Partway through the Boston show, Sara started playing voicemails.
Not her voice. Strangers. A woman talking about losing her father to pancreatic cancer. A man in his 80s talking about how lonely he is since his wife died after 50 years together.
A person hands their grief to an artist. The artist holds it up in front of thousands of people. The room goes quiet. And then everyone in it remembers one of the most defining human traits. We all grieve.
One room has guitars. One has a piano. Underneath, it’s the same thing.
We are all different and we are all the same. Two opposing thoughts that are both true.
There’s a podcast called All There Is, where Anderson Cooper talks with people about grief. Sara wrote a song on the new album after hearing his conversation with Stephen Colbert.
Colbert says something in there I keep coming back to. We used to have rituals for mourning. A year of it. Black armbands. Clothing that told everyone you passed on the street that something had happened to you. You didn’t have to explain. People could see it, and they could ask, or not ask, and either way you weren’t carrying it alone in the dark.
We got rid of all that. And we didn’t replace it with anything.
Colbert describes what’s left as a thirst that everybody has, with nobody pouring water for anybody.
That’s what I think I was witnessing that night. Not a concert exactly. A room where 3,000 people agreed to feel something hard at the same time, on purpose, with somebody up front making it safe to do it.
That’s a ritual. We just don’t call it one because there are t-shirts for sale in the lobby.
When I started this Heart-Strong thing, I built a playlist. Songs I go to when I’m working, or when I’m questioning why I’m doing this at all.
I Am Mine by Pearl Jam is on it. It’s probably my favorite PJ song. I’ve listened to it more times than I could count.
There’s a line in it about sorrow.
“The sorrow grows bigger when the sorrow’s denied”
It says it pretty simply. When you deny your grieving, it doesn’t go away. It actually grows bigger.
A few months ago, I sat by a fire with Rob Reider. He and his wife lost their daughter Lila at 38 weeks. When he went looking for support, he found there wasn’t much of anything built for fathers. So, he built it.
He told me something he heard from a grief researcher. Grief needs a witness.
Pearl Jam, Sara, Colbert, and Cooper agree with this. And they are doing something about it.
Here’s the part I want to spend some time on.
Most of us file grief under one heading. Somebody died. That’s when you’re allowed to use the word.
But grief is bigger than that. It is a response to losing something that mattered to you. The feeling is much bigger than what we often enable it to be.
We also grieve the person we thought we’d become. What we think our country can be but isn’t. The body that used to be able to do the thing we love to do. The friendships that just quietly become less close. The parts of ourselves we put away so early that we don’t remember how it happened.
None of them come with a casserole or a card. There’s no ritual for them and no word most people feel entitled to use. So, it goes underground, and it comes out sideways, usually as anger.
A Pearl Jam show and a Sara Bareilles show could not look more different. Different rooms, different crowds, different volume, different everything.
And they’re doing the identical thing.
Grief works the same way. Nobody’s looks like anybody else’s. Mine doesn’t look like yours, and comparing them is a bad idea that people do constantly. And at the same time, every single person reading this is carrying some.
Over the next few posts, I’m going to write about grief from a few different angles.
Not because it’s sad. Because it’s one of the very few things that’s actually universal. And because every time I follow something I end up in the same place. I want to tell a story.
This Substack is a production of Heart-Strong, a nonprofit centered around a simple belief. The world works better, for everyone and everything in it, when more of us are pulled by love than controlled by fear. We have an open invite for anyone curious about what that world could look like. Learn more at www.heart-strong.org.
We grieve because we loved someone or something. That's a powerful framing. Thank you for sharing. It makes me wonder where there may be parts of myself that still could use some healthy grieving. Without it, we get stuck.
ah, yes. control. isn't funny how we can grieve something rooted in control, when we actually never have control. us humans are interesting...