Grieving a Difficult Person
How do you remember someone you spent time trying to forget?
My wife scoffs at the mere mention of the numbers “90210” in sequence. She was never a fan of the television show that coincided with our breach of the teenage plateau, and rolls her eyes loudly when I deign to watch a rerun.
Beverly Hills 90210, whether she likes it or not, is a sort of cultural touchstone for people of a certain age1. A decent cast of stereotypes2 was paired together with fair to lousy writing and storylines, captivating an audience of teens that were so over the buffet of trash presented to them through the network sitcom, but not old enough to appreciate the brilliance of L.A. Law. It was the only television show talking to teens in an era where gangster rap was emerging and L.A. burned, war dominated our television screens for a couple of weeks, and the first bombing of the World Trade Center occurred.3
Boomers had thirtysomething. Gen X had 90210.
Shannen Doherty, one of the show’s leads, died last week after a long, protracted battle with breast cancer. She was first diagnosed in 2015, went into remission two years later. By 2020 it was back, eventually spreading to her brain and bones. She was 53, seven years older than me. She’s the second person from the original cast of the show to die. Luke Perry had a massive stroke in 2019.
Get beyond the retrospectives and outpouring of fan and co-star grief, and what you’re left with is complicated individual that didn’t always bring out the best in the people around her.
Years after the show ended, many of her co-stars have written about Doherty’s “bad behavior” in their own memoirs. From being demanding of publicists to showing up late to set to her partying ways to her quick marriages and even quicker divorces, Doherty made headlines. Honestly, I don’t think anything she did then would even catch our attention now. But remember the “I Hate Brenda” newsletter? Before the Internet, over 7,000 copies of the newsletter were mailed out to subscribers. There was an entire album called “Hating Brenda.” People even complained about her bangs and her eyebrows. (Paste Magazine)
She’s tough on the set. She’s just a child of the industry. It’s not really who she is. She’s just whoever she plays, in a lot of ways. She’s just a kind of unusual, very talented professional but hard to get along with. She just kind of pissed everyone off eventually and she pissed off the most important person, which was, you know, Tori [Spelling, Donna]. And not only that, she introduced Tori to a man who beat her. So that pretty much put the death card on her. So that was pretty much that. I think they were willing to go with her but, basically, what happened was, in the middle of a show, she cut her hair and totally screwed us up for continuity so everyone was pissed off at her. (Larry Mollin)
Doherty was the bad conscience of Nineties girlhood, which was why America was so fascinated with the idea of hating her. Like Brenda, she was judged by ridiculously hypocritical double standards, sexualized and then demonized for it. She was about one-sixth as destructive as your average Hollywood male star of the time, yet she was the one constantly on trial for being everybody’s worst-case-scenario of a messy girl in public, prosecuted in her own real-life Salem Bitch Trials. Yet she refused to back down or play nice. This bitch would not burn. (Rolling Stone)
Not all of us are excoriated in the entertainment press or have hate tracks written about us. But, not all of us will have Jennie Garth and Jason Priestly write tribute posts about us either.
We choose to remember the best when someone dies4, whether it’s true or not. A lot of icing and fondant gets applied. Grief is hard enough when you’re in a healthy, even-keeled relationship with someone else, but what happens when it’s complicated? How do you say goodbye to someone who you wish you never met?
A feeling of relief?
I’ve gone on and on about the difficult relationships in my life, both familial and friend-based. The passing of my grandmothers were two very different journeys. My maternal grandmother was very maternal; a loving and caring woman who eventually lost her cognitive abilities and everything else to Alzheimer’s. My grandmother, who died from vascular dementia, was not a nice person. One of them brought joy to her grandchildren; the other brought poison to a family. It was tough saying goodbye to the one; I couldn’t leave the funeral for quickly enough for the other.
Jennifer Lovemore, writing for her own blog, discusses the death of her own mother through this lens:
I buried my mom’s ashes with mixed feelings. Sadness because her life was over, yet relieved because I wouldn’t have to try and manage the relationship any more. Sad because I never received from her what I needed, and sad because she couldn’t give it.
As I pressed the ground into place over her ashes, I felt relieved to be safe and free. And sad because I shouldn’t have to feel relieved.
Lovemore goes on to say that it’s natural to question your grief in these times as you may not feel any due to the relief that the person is no longer alive, followed by the guilt for feeling that way.
The next step in that journey is the isolation you might feel by being the only person to feel that way. Others weep and emote, while you stand silent and question your own feelings. Maybe they’re indifference; maybe there is a shred of happiness that your life can move on without them. Our relationships are our own, as is our grief, and the time and place to explain to someone why you don’t miss the person who died isn’t the receiving line at the funeral home.
Lovemore and another writer, Larry Michael Barber, both agree that you’re grief and mourning need to happen on your terms based on your experience, not the group’s or what conventional wisdom might suggest.
That feeling of relief washing over you? It’s valid, specifically in the case where you may have had a tortured or toxic relationship. Smiling and openly celebrating a death? That might be a line too far, but again, your grief is your grief. If the death of an abusive parent represents an unshackling of the bonds that tie us down, well, do be it.
Your grief may also manifest itself in fantasy. This is the coulda, shoulda, woulda program where you tie up the loose ends in your mind around the concept of what your relationship may have been had all parties gone down a different road. Children with absent parents might grieve the loss by thinking about the things they could have done with their father, or what it may have been like to have a grandparent that was more true to type.
Barber also suggests that there is an eventual reckoning:
In evaluating a troublesome relationship with its many troublesome emotions we have to determine whether forgiveness is called for: forgiving the one who died or forgiving ourselves for our perceived faults in the relationship.
More than an IG post
You’re not supposed to kick a person while their down, and a death is the ultimate ground floor (literally and figuratively). Try to remember the last death of a famous person that was accompanied with scorn and feelings of good riddance. Jeffrey Epstein is the best I can come up with as an example. The famous person death often comes with it the high-gloss paint of tribute and revisionism, as their peers set aside differences and bad feelings.
The entertainment media machine is busy cranking out pieces that paint Shannen Doherty as misunderstood and victim of misogyny. Prior to this week, there had been plenty of different words to describe her — callous being the nicest — and coverage of all her bad acts. She had a complicated history full of complicated relationships, not unlike many of us.
It’s up to us to choose how we grieve and how we feel. It’s also up to us to determine how we are remembered.
Finding the most productive grief journey for someone that we had a difficult relationship with isn’t just a social media post. It’s a torrent of emotions that we have to sit with and reflect upon as they happen.
Final thoughts on finality…
“So they're looking at me. So what? They've been looking at me for days, Brandon! ‘Oh, poor David, is he going to be okay? I hope he hasn't cracked up yet.’ I can't even walk through the halls without someone in my face trying to cheer me up like they're my new best friend! Well what about my old best friend? It doesn't matter what you write about him in that paper, Brandon. It doesn't matter what you say about someone once they're gone. What matters is how you treat them when they're still here.”
― Brian Austin Green, as David Silver, Beverly Hills 90210 (Season 2, Episode 14)
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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Mine, namely.
There were the fish out of water in Brenda and Brandon, the tramp-turned-good girl, the one with the learning disability, the dork(s), the spoiled rich jerk, and the rich kid from a bad home, for starters.
Sadly, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose just didn’t have legs.
I’m told that you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead.