Finding Comfort in Grief: Understanding Longing Through Andrew Garfield
Trigger Warning: This article contains a discussion of death, loss, and grief.
I’ve always been an emotional and sensitive person, and I think it’s just a part of who I am. These traits are intrinsically woven into how I interact with the world around me. Since watching the trailer for A24’s We Live In Time, starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, I’ve probably watched and read everything related to that film. I’m counting down the days till the nationwide release, eager to experience the love, loss, and pain present in the film.
When I saw that Andrew Garfield was featured on this week’s episode of The New York Times podcast Modern Love, I immediately pulled it up on my TV. I was already having a particularly hard day, with my emotions all over the place. I had already cried a couple of times before starting the podcast, and as expected, I sobbed while listening. The weight of the words spoken resonated with me deeply, and I found myself crying even more after the episode ended.
Before delving into the essay about love and loss, host Anna Martin poses a couple of questions to Garfield regarding the film. In response, he shares so many gems that I found myself pausing the episode several times just to take in what he was sharing. One quote struck me profoundly: “The only gateway to true vitality through a broken heart is acknowledging that our hearts are meant to break and break and break and live by breaking.”
This led to him talking about onism, which is a completely new concept to me. Onism is described as “the frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits only one place at a time, (and) the awareness of how little of the world you’ll experience.” Hearing Andrew articulate this idea awakened something within me. I realized this is a feeling I’ve experienced multiple times but had never fully understood. It made me think of always longing for more. As humans, we’re not wired to be completely content; we’ll always long for more. Andrew eloquently captures this notion when he mentions, “There’s a kind of an imprisonment in the life that you have, realizing you’re trapped to a certain amount of experience as you’re alive.”
Andrew reads the essay “Learning to Measure Time in Love and Loss” by Chris Huntington. Towards the end of the essay, he becomes emotional, reflecting on how art can “get us to places we can’t get ourselves.” This raw and vulnerable moment is a first in Modern Love history. While discussing why Garfield felt so deeply, he touches on several thought-provoking ideas. He says, “It’s like we all pass with so much more to know with so much more longing.” This resonates with me as I often contemplate death, grief, and everything in between. Garfield touches on the harsh reality of the human experience of never truly having all the answers and always longing for more. Life, it seems, is a constant journey of discovery that never quite reaches its end.
“I’m sad at losing anyone. I’m sad at losing anything. I’m sad at the transience of certain relationships in my life. I’m sad at losing my mother, of course. I’m sad at the idea of losing my father, of not being there when my nephews are my age or older. I’m sad at the concept of not having children of my own. But the sadness is longing. It’s true longing, and there’s no shame in it.”
What he shares is such a profound and honest reflection on the nature of loss, longing, and the deeply human experience of grappling with impermanence. I had to pause the episode, once again overwhelmed by tears. There’s a lot of grief in recognizing that we can’t hold onto what we love forever. Andrew beautifully articulates this sadness as longing, a yearning desire.
In a 2021 interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Garfield spoke about how playing Broadway composer Jonathan Larson helped him process the loss of his mother, who died from pancreatic cancer in 2019. He said, “I hope this grief stays with me. This is all of the unexpressed love.” I remember watching this interview as it went viral; his response was unexpected yet profoundly insightful. “I hope this grief stays with me because it’s all of the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her, and I told her every day, she was the best of us.” For many, including myself, this was a new way to understand grief: wanting it to remain as a testament to our love.
When Garfield speaks about sadness being longing, I can’t help but reflect on this interview from almost three years ago. It resonates deeply, reminding us that longing and grief are intertwined parts of our human experience.
“Be the best prisoner you can be.” This is the final sentence of the essay Garfield is reading. It’s up to each person to interpret what that line means and how it resonates with them. While Martin sees the prison as “onism,” Garfield describes it as “this body.” He explains, “The prison being the fated thing, the thing that we have no control over. And it’s just, how do we surrender to our fate so that we can live into our destiny?” By accepting the realities we cannot change, we may better navigate our life path. In this sense, we are all, in some way, "prisoners" of our own circumstances—whether they be time, space, fate, or personal limitations.
