Football, Grief, and Overcoming
In the days after my mother’s funeral, one of my best friends reached out. He’d lost his Dad a few years earlier and is one of the most honest people I know.
“People keep saying it will get better,” I told him.
“It’s true to a degree,” he assured me. “Mostly it’s just something you get used to.”
In the fourteen years I’ve known him, he’s never once lied to me, so I don’t imagine he’s lying now. But I have trouble imagining a life in which I am used to the fact that my mother is gone forever.
There have been a few milestones in the four months since her passing that have signaled I may be “getting used” to my grief: when I started sleeping through the night again, or when my appetite went back to normal. But the one thing that has taken the longest to return is my capacity to experience any form of emotion, not just grief or sorrow. How did I know it had started to come back? That’s an easy one.
Football.
The Grief of the Pandemic
I started following Liverpool FC more intimately in January 2018. I spent hours watching games and learning about the rules and nuances of football. It felt easy to give myself over to whatever the emotion was of the game: frustration, glee, anticipation, resentment, elation. During the pandemic, I ached for it like a missing limb. I dived into any documentary I could find, churning through YouTube channels explaining tactical strategy or rivalries between teams thousands of miles away.
When the Bundesliga began playing games behind closed doors, I was there right away.. It didn’t matter that I knew nothing about the league; I longed for the feeling of football. For too long, we had all been in a grieving period of our own - mourning the loss of our old lives, the way things used to be, and fearing the unknown future of a post-pandemic world. With football back, at least on our TV screens, our old lives didn’t seem gone forever, just morphed slightly, which opened the door for another lapsed feeling: hope.
Then the Premier League returned, and more emotions flooded back to me. But when the club I support lifted an historic league title in an empty Anfield, the feeling felt muted. As an American, the moment was really no different for me than it would have been without a pandemic; I would not have been in Liverpool, but in my living room, just as I was in 2020. But it still felt wrong to me, that no one was there with them to celebrate such a significant moment.
As fans returned to stadiums across the world, the feelings blossomed and the intensity of them grew vibrant. For the last game of the 2020-21 season, I even watched from a bar in New York City. I had longed for the shouting crowds, the beer flying, people hugging one another in delight, others storming off in defeat. I rode that high for days afterwards.
A Life Without Football
In the days leading up to my mother’s death, we were at the nursing home all of the time. It didn’t cross my mind whether I’d missed a work call or a doctor’s appointment, much less a Liverpool game. Her funeral was the day we beat Arsenal in the second leg of the semi-final, on our way to face Chelsea in the EFL Cup final. The day we won, the only thing I remember was thinking “I didn’t know they made the goalkeepers take penalties” when I saw the outcome on Twitter. I missed the Champions League Round of 16 games and the FA Cup quarter finals. I saw none of it, from the draw with Chelsea on January 2nd through the first Benfica game on April 5th. For three months, football never crossed my mind.
When I think back on it now, nothing else changed during that time besides my mom’s passing. I didn’t lose access to how I watched the games, or fall out with my other football-mad friends. If anything, those friends were checking in on me and sending me other, cheerful or funny distractions, none of which related to football. By mid-February I was listening to podcasts about football again and was aware of what was happening in the Premier League, but it seemed too hard to allow myself to care about something that could break my heart when it already felt as though it had shattered.
That is, until my father and I went away to visit a friend who had created a beautiful short film of old photos, music and home movies for my mother’s service. It was a touching tribute I will never forget, and as a thank you, my Dad built him a small piece of furniture. In early April, we packed up the piece and my golden retriever and headed north-west for six hours to Rochester, New York.
While we were there he asked me about Liverpool, clearly concerned in his own way - the way that fathers do - that I had lost some of my own passion. When I explained how close the title race was, he sought out a way for us to watch the game. It was the showdown between Liverpool and Manchester City - a potential decider. I didn’t want to at first, but as the score evened I felt myself letting go. I gave in to the excitement and superstition, telling people to go back into other rooms when City scored a second goal.
Recovery
After that first game back, it became easy to fall into my old habits. I started to prioritise watching games again, getting up at wild hours even on the weekend to cheer on my club. The excitement of football in general spilled over and so I watched other teams and leagues as well, trying to learn more and (once again) filling up my friends’ DMs and Whats App chats with questions. But it’s not quite the same as it was before… not yet.
Last weekend it was Mother’s Day here in the United States. The weekend’s results (a tie for us against Spurs, and Manchester City beating Newcastle 5-0) did nothing to help the club I love, and so on Sunday afternoon I had to give in to my grief. I put on the little film of my mother that my friend created and cried. I have not yet figured out how to exist in this world without her, and it makes navigating all of my emotions tumultuous. Sometimes I am elated over good news, but that feeling usually gives way to guilt, either that I should be sad or that my mother cannot share in my happiness. And when things are bad - even if they are just a little bad - I find myself fighting back tears.
For three months at the beginning of this year, I forgot the advice I received from the Alzheimer’s community of caregivers when my mother was first diagnosed thirteen years ago. “This disease is going to take one person,” they told me.
“Don’t let it take two.”
For three months, I felt grey, devoid of flavour or colour or vibrancy. I lacked the full breadth of my emotions, and turned away from my passions. Now, as they return to me, they feel unfamiliar and difficult to navigate, but I know they will come back just as I came back to football. This past weekend, I sat riveted and nervous through the entire FA Cup final, hoping beyond hope for a happy ending. But when the moment came and we had won, there were no cheers or dancing in my house. There were only tears, joy mixed with grief, with me caught in the riptide of my football team’s successes crashing into the tragedy of my personal life. It serves as a reminder that the good and the bad come simultaneously - the wins and the losses are often tied inexplicably together. Some days will be better and some days will be worse.
It’s just something I’m getting used to.