Andrew Garfield said it on a podcast. It took me two days to understand what he’d just done to me.
My mother, three times. The last one is graduation — her hand on my shoulder, the way it always was.
My mom was 76.
I still reach for the phone. Some piece of good news, some stupid thing I saw that she’d have laughed at, and my hand moves before my brain does. Then my brain catches up. Four decades in this business, a career built on knowing what to say and when to say it, and I can’t train that one reflex out of myself. I’ve stopped trying.
I was about forty-five minutes into the new SmartLess with Andrew Garfield when he said the thing he’s been saying since he lost his own mother. Grief is all the unexpressed love. The love that didn’t get anywhere. It doesn’t disappear when the person does. It just sits in your chest with no address to send it to, and we call it sadness because we don’t have a better word for love that got stranded.
I had to stop what I was doing.
Because it named the thing. What I’ve been carrying isn’t sorrow. It’s inventory. It’s everything I meant to give her and didn’t, still sitting on the shelf.
Still open — one specific thing. The trip you didn’t take her on, the question you never asked, the thing you figured there was time for.
Here’s what took me far too long to understand.
It’s not only about the dead.
I’m also carrying the call I didn’t make to a friend before things went quiet between us. The thank-you I drafted in my head at 2am and never typed. The actor I believed in for years who I’m not sure I ever told, in plain words, out loud, how much I believed in them. I assumed it was obvious. Nothing is obvious. Same inventory. Same shelf. Love with nowhere to go.
Our business is engineered to keep you from feeling any of it. Next audition. Next pitch. Next quarter. Grief doesn’t fit the schedule, so we box it up and call ourselves resilient. That isn’t resilience. That’s deferral. The bill comes due anyway, and it comes due with interest.
So the only useful thing I know is stupidly simple, and almost nobody does it.
Say it while they’re here.
Send the text. Make the call. Tell people what they mean to you while they can still hear it, instead of saving it for a eulogy, where let’s be honest it’s mostly for us. Tell your kid. Tell your partner. Tell the assistant who saved your ass last Tuesday. Tell the friend you’ve known since the mailroom who you assume already knows. It will feel awkward. Do it awkwardly. Awkward and said beats smooth and too late every single time.
I’m not writing this from some finished place. I owe three of these calls right now and I’m scared of two of them. I’m telling you because saying it out loud in public makes me more likely to actually pick up the phone.
Every piece of love you express now is one less piece of grief you carry later.
Call your mother.
And if you can’t, call someone.
Andrew Garfield has been saying a version of this line since he first said it to Stephen Colbert in 2021, after losing his mother. It isn’t mine. I’m just one more person it caught.
