07/02/2025
After his wife, Joan, died two years ago, Richard E. Grant began to post videos of himself talking about his bereavement on Instagram, creating a remarkable record of life after loss, Sophie Gilbert writes. https://theatln.tc/hoH3dF0e
An online community quickly formed around Grant’s videos. This month, he published a memoir chronicling the triumphs and hardships of his career, marriage, and journey with grief. The book, “A Pocketful of Happiness,” is titled after an edict that his wife gave him before she died, a reminder to seek out small moments of joy every day.
“She’d never come up with this phrase before in our marriage,” Grant told Gilbert. “I think if one of us had ever said it, we’d have concluded it sounded like something from a Hallmark card. But it’s proved to be a very profound mantra from which to live.”
“[Grant’s] willingness to perform an experience so typically understood as private—to so energetically upend our sense that the ‘right’ way to get through it is stoically, and alone—is striking,” Gilbert continues. “He’s dismissive of the unspoken tradition of giving people space in the immediate aftermath of bereavement, the very ‘time that you need people to talk to.’”
He still has, he tells Gilbert, days where he is so “poleaxed” by grief that the only thing to do is submit to it and wait for it to pass, but, she writes, “he also has good days, splendid days, days with happiness by the bucketload.”
📷: Sophia Spring / Guardian / eyevine / Redux
