A Dead Dads Club Meeting with Caitlin Reilly
"The constant is love, and that constant transcends time and universal planes."
Actress Caitlin Reilly’s social media is a treasure trove of hysterics. Whether she’s the “chaotic mother in every award-winning indie film,” “the girl who is absolutely not getting proposed to by New Years,” or, a personal favorite, the “actress who does a Comic-Con panel,” her brand is consistently hilarious. So when I saw her January 9th post on social media, less than a week after my father succumbed to his cancer, I was pretty shocked by the shift in tone.
“It’s been 2 years today since my dad died and grief is a funny thing,” she wrote with an accompanying image of her father looking like a cross between Robert Redford and Patrick Duffy. “Since this day happened, the dreaded 9th, I’ve been terrified of it. I spent days agonizing over what I was going to do, how I was going to distract myself. What if I don’t spend the day honoring him enough? What if I don’t honor him properly? What if I have a bad day, is that disrespectful to his spirit? IS he a spirit? Is he here? Is his spirit mad at me, which is why he is never in my dreams? Is it okay that his ashes are in my dining room? Does he not like it there? Should I move him? Can he hear all of my thoughts? Are ghosts psychic?”
Part of my grief journey has involved conversations with many people (many of you, in fact) about grief. But Caitlin is someone whose grief journey I came to, not vice versa. And so I asked if she’d have a Zoom chat with me to discuss our dead dads. She kindly agreed.
First of all, thank you for agreeing to do this. I was just really struck when I read your posts about your father because of something that someone said to me recently: “Grief brings out the writer in us.” I don't think they just meant you and I, who are in a profession like this; I think in general, people write really resonant things after a loved one passes. I wanted to know if you've had experiences of reading other people’s writing about grief that are not, you know, Joan Didion?
Yeah, well, hello, Joan Didion. You know, it's weird: I think grief does something to your brain where it simplifies your thoughts. I think that when people usually write things, your brain starts to overcomplicate the process. So then, if you're having a thought about grief and you decide to write something about it, your brain is so simplified by the grief that the writing becomes very real and poignant. And I've noticed this with people that aren’t writers, too. Whenever someone shares something about a monumental passing they've had, I feel like I'm always reading these beautiful little essays. It's sort of this raw, simplified way of sharing how you feel, which I think is the best writing.
So when it comes to grief, I feel like it's interesting — and I imagine you've had this experience — where, in talking about it publicly, people then feel compelled to share their grief with you. You become a receptacle of others’ grief. As someone who has a really large platform, what has that experience been like for you, of taking on other people's grief amidst your own?
I don't see it as taking on other people's grief. It's sort of like we're in a club now: The Dead Dad Club or The Dead Mom Club specifically. Losing a parent is such a wild experience and it's very specific in terms of loss and grief. And I have so many people reaching out to me about losing their dad if they had the kind of dad that I did — I was a daddy's girl, just super close — or a similar thing with their mom, or any kind of parental figure. I think people just want to connect, and I like it. It normalizes it for me. I don't feel as alone in this experience, because most of my friends haven’t experienced a huge, monumental loss yet, but I have, so the experience can be really isolating. And I think when people reach out to me and share, it feels nice. It's like we're sort of all part of The Dead Parent Club.
You know, I am so shocked, because I posted this prompt a few months back asking my Instagram followers to share about their grief over their departed fathers with me on a Google Form and I now have over 600 entries. I kept the form for stories about just dads solely for the reason that I knew if I expanded to any dead parent, I simply wouldn’t be able to read all of them. So to your point, as isolating of an experience as it is, it’s also so common to have a dead dad or parent in general.
And every family dynamic is different for everybody. Some people don't even have dads. Some people had terrible dads. Some people had wonderful dads. I remember Nicole Kidman was being interviewed by Marc Maron and she was talking about her dad passing away, and I was listening to this days after my dad passed away and it just came up randomly when I was listening to this podcast. Nicole was talking about how the second that her dad died, all of the structure that she felt in her life, in her family, and as a person just immediately went away. That's how I felt. I think there's something specifically going on when you lose a father, where you feel like — it's the dad. Like, Dad's always the strongest. He's always gonna be okay. He’s Dad! It's Dad, right? He's always been there. He's always been the patriarch. For me, he was the strong, silent constant in the family. He sort of kept everything going. And when he passed, he was sick for a long time. He was older. I'm a grown-ass adult, but I felt like all of the structure in my life, everything I had known, and everything I thought I was going to know just got wiped clean, and that's a very specific experience; in terms of loss, in terms of grief, in terms of losing a parent. This can be interchangeable with moms as well. But with my family dynamic specifically, losing my dad is a much more fucked-up, monumental experience than losing my mom because I have a very different, specific relationship with my mom.
I wanted to circle back to a comment you made about how some people don't even have dads; I had several people reach out to me asking if they could fill out the questionnaire, saying that their dad is alive, but not for them. There are so many dynamics; so many people that have been abandoned. I had one person tell me a story of their dad calling them one day and saying that he didn't want to be in their lives anymore, and they never heard from him again. There are so many variants of all this. Also, thinking about death by suicide is a very different kind of grief that you grapple with.
There's a girlfriend of mine who lost her father when she was 16 to suicide, and we talk about our dad losses together, but her experience is very different. Suicide losses are very, very specific. Very complicated.
When I first watched the Buffy episode “The Body,” I was just sad to lose the character of Buffy’s mom. But now I watch it and I'm like, “Oh, my God.” The way they captured this! Have there been depictions of death in media that you've visited or revisited since your dad's death that ping for you because of the proximity to your experience or for whichever reason?
I have one really big one where if I watch it in its entirety, I have to take a sabbatical for a week and a half, and that would be the movie Interstellar. I remember the first time I watched it in 2014; my dad had Alzheimer's for a long time, so there was an aspect of feeling like I could no longer communicate with him, but he was still there and we were trying so hard to communicate with each other. So I saw Interstellar, and it was with this guy I had been dating for a month who I was still trying to be really cute and carefree with. And we put on Interstellar, and I'm trying so hard not to sob that I'm almost gonna throw up. And then I watched it again recently, and the same thing happened. I just sat on the couch and kind of cathartically sobbed for an hour. And there's something about that movie because it's, it's — I could talk about Interstellar for like five hours. This movie is not about space; it's about love. It's about a love between a father and a daughter that quite literally transcends universes and time, and they figure out how to get back to each other in a way that is so logically nonsensical. The constant is love, and that constant transcends time and universal planes. And that's kind of how I felt with my dad because we were no longer really able to communicate. It also just reminds me of when someone passes and you still kind of feel like they're there and you still feel like you can communicate with them, but it's just in this different way. That movie fucks. Me. Up. It's the movie that I really want to watch but have to avoid because it reminds me so much of loss. It's really weird. And just anything in a TV show that depicts a funeral — I can't just watch that casually. It's very weird. I went to a funeral yesterday and it was rough. I'm such an emotional person now, way more than I used to be. I feel like I cry very easily now. Death kind of opens you up, a little bit. It cracks you open, in a way.
Have you had experiences where you felt like your dad was reaching out to you? My mom just moved into a new apartment, and she texted me recently that she was trying to close the closet door and the sleeve of one of my dad's coats which she keeps in there came out of the door as she was trying to close it. And she was like, “I think that's Dad.” And I was like, “I don't think that's Dad.” But is that Dad? It's a choice that you make to believe it, I think. Have you had experiences where you felt that, in very real ways, your dad was here?
It's one of those things where it's like, I fully believe that shit. It makes more sense to me than for that to not be a thing. It's just like: Science and magic are real. You know what I mean? Energy is real. It's all real.
Marianne Williamson, baby!
Yeah! I haven't gotten that dream visit yet. I've had a couple of dreams, but they've been so fleeting. But his birthday is November 11. So it's 11/11. I have an 11/11 necklace. And this could just be happenstance, but I see 11:11 every day, twice a day, without even trying. Every single day, twice a day: in the morning and at night. Every time. I check my phone; it's 11:11. I catch a glimpse of time somewhere; it's 11:11. I feel like that's his consistent way of saying hello to me. There are also all these other little things all the time. My sister recently bought a house, which was super exciting and a super special thing, and I was driving up to visit her. I have like 9,000 favorite’d songs on Spotify, so I just turn that on and whatever pops up, pops up. I was driving up this hill and I was turning the corner to her house, and it's just this beautiful house. She worked so hard to save money to buy this house and it's like a dream. I'm finally looking at this beautiful house and my parents’ wedding song starts playing as I'm driving up the road. It just felt like my dad was saying, “Hi! Hello!” Like, “Yes, this is so special! I'm so happy for you guys.” Little things like that happen constantly, that don't necessarily seem like a coincidence.
Have you had experiences where you kind of get sidelined by people? I’ll be at a fashion event or something, and someone will come over to me and they'll be like, “I'm so sorry about your dad.” And obviously, their intention is really kind, but basically, people bring up the trauma unintentionally at a moment when it wasn't on your mind and then you're reminded that your dad is dead and then it's a complicated feeling because you're annoyed at that person even though they were doing something seemingly very sweet. Have you had that experience at all, where it gets brought up at a time when you just were really caught off-guard by the reminder that your dad is not alive?
All the time. I got invited to go to the SAG Awards. I was really excited, and it was the first award show I'd ever gone to and I was wearing a gown. I was at the after party having a blast and someone came up and grabbed my arm and was like, “Oh my God, I'm such a huge fan of yours!” And I was like, “Oh my God, I'm such a huge fan of yours!” And we started talking and they were like, “I'm so sorry about your dad. That thing that you wrote on Instagram was beautiful and heart-wrenching.” And I was just like, “Yeah.” Like, it was. All of a sudden I had to tap into this person, you know what I mean? It's weird, but that does happen sometimes for sure. And also, you know, because you're a public person on Instagram and you have a platform and such: When people talk to you, they feel like they know you. I mean, I always appreciate people wanting to connect with me in that way out in the world, but when they want to talk about stuff like that, it's like, “Oh, oh, okay.” It's this weird thing of: I don't know who you are, but we're talking about it. You know what I mean? But you put it out there, so it's your fault. So it's, you know, it's just… interesting.
It's complicated because, like you say, you put yourself out there not necessarily knowing. I think maybe you're like me: I don't think about my “reach”; it's not something that I'm conscious of. So when I'm posting, especially when it comes to anything about my dad, it's never with the intention to connect with people. There's not a lot of thought to why I do it besides I went home, I felt a strong emotion, and I'm someone who communicates by writing. So it wasn’t something where I was like, “Oh, I think other people will find solace in this” — that's not the thought process. The fact that other people do is wonderful. But then when they reach out saying, “Thank you so much for sharing this,” they're thanking me for something in which my intention was not at all wrapped up in what they're receiving — which is not a bad thing, but it's a weird thing.
Totally. I get a lot of those “thank you so much for sharing this” messages. People were thanking me in a way where it's like — are people not talking about this kind of stuff? And they're not! I come from a family where everyone's yelling and screaming and communicating. And my sisters and I are so open about our grief. So open. We talk about it all the time, and other people don't. I guess you don't realize that if you have a blue checkmark next to your name, and you have that reach and you share something like that in a way that's eloquent and resonates with people, that helps that person get through their day. We're not Mother Teresa or anything, but it's just that people don't talk about this shit. And that's so foreign to me, but that’s so common for so many other people. Grieving in the world of social media is a very interesting thing. Like you, I never think about what I post ever, even if it's some stupid video I put on my story, or if I'm talking about my dead dad. I just don't think about it.
It’s nice talking to you right now because I feel like we relate on the dead dad thing, but then also being people that share things online and then feel strangely about it. It's an interesting thing that we don’t talk about a lot, because it sounds indulgent to be talking about the fact that we're “public figures”; even saying that phrase is kind of bleh. But it is true. My best friend’s mom died earlier this year and she posted a video of her mom singing and I shared it on Instagram and it got her thousands of views. She reached out to me and she was like, “Thank you so much. Now all these people got to see my mom,” and she was so happy about it. It's one of those things where there is a power in having a platform like this to be able to share things like this. Even if in my mind, I wasn't thinking, “Let's get this video of your mom more views.” I was just there wanting to express my love.
Exactly.
The last thing I want to ask you about is speaking to something you just touched on, which is hearing from people that we don't talk about this enough. That's something I've heard in so many of the emails that I've been parsing through, and particularly people saying we don’t talk about it enough in America. I do think that there are other cultures in which discussions of grief are more normalized.
Grief is more public in other cultures and in other countries and in America, I feel like it’s very private.
And also I think in other cultures, there's more of an understanding of the “celebration of life” component of grief. What are your thoughts on that? Personally, grief is something I never even thought about before I was in this “club” of grief because I was never confronted by it, which sort of corroborates the idea that we don't talk enough about grief as a culture.
I went to a funeral yesterday, and my sisters and I still haven't had a funeral for my dad yet because he died in January of 2021. In the last two years, it hasn't made sense to have something quite yet, so we're having something this year. I almost wanted to hold off on having a memorial and sort of having that closure because I didn't want to have a day that felt like a funeral; if I had a day that felt like a funeral, I would have lost my fucking mind. I think that having a celebration of life part is still cathartic; you still share stories, you still have your place to mourn and cry and hug and speak. But there's also a happiness there and an appreciation there, and I feel like funerals in America specifically are so dark. We're so over-dramatic and up our own asses. It’s so obnoxious. In other countries and cultures, they’re having these beautiful, colorful parades. That's the funeral. I think if we did more of that, grieving would be a lot more open and easier and more shareable. Because when you have a big loss happen in your life, people all of a sudden start to treat you like you’re glass, or they start to treat you in a way that's inappropriate because they're freaking out and don't know how to treat you.
Less anxiety and more beautiful, colorful parades.