Andrew Garfield shares story on grieving his mother

Andrew Garfield is generous with his grief.

Not that one’s mourning process should be assigned value by others, but Garfield’s ability to so lovingly and poetically express his grief for his mother, Linda, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, offers a gift of connection, and, perhaps, catharsis, to anyone experiencing loss.

“My mother’s qualities that were the most kind of obvious, or apparent, were a gentleness, a kindness, a generosity,” Garfield told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a thoughtful discussion for the third season of the podcast “All There Is.” “On her hospice bed, she was more concerned with the nurses than she was with her own pain and discomfort. She was that kind of person.”

When the actor spoke about his mother’s death during a 2021 appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” since viewed more than two million times on YouTube, his vulnerability seemed to touch the hearts of many who were themselves grieving loved ones during the pandemic.

“I hope this grief stays with me, because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her, and I told her every day,” Garfield said at the time. “She was the best of us.”

The grief has stayed with him, as he hoped, in the nearly five years since his mother died.

“It’s so weird. It’s like the longing and the grief, fully inhabiting it and feeling it is the only way I can really feel close to her again,” Garfield told Cooper.

It was his mother, described by Garfield as creative and sensitive to his teen angst, who first encouraged him to explore a career in the arts. When he tried acting, which Garfield jokingly compared to “joining the circus,” he felt he’d found his place. Dozens of film and television roles, two Oscar nominations and a superhero franchise followed.

Garfield’s latest project, the weepy and romantic “We Live in Time,” returns to the topic of grief. He costars in the film with Florence Pugh as a young couple living with a cancer diagnosis.

“There’s a burgeoning awareness of time being short and conditional and therefore every single moment feels very sacred, tiny little moments, big expansive moments. It’s like a meditation on the shortness and sacredness of life and it feels like every scene is a grief scene,” Garfield said of the story. “It’s a beautiful film, it was beautiful to inhabit, and it feels meditative, and it feels very wise, and it feels full of rage as well, raging against the dying of the light.”

Garfield’s light still burns, if altered, as he reconciles life without his beloved and British “mum.”

“I know for a fact that this is a short life, and the things that mattered before don’t matter anymore. And I think when I say things taste differently, I think things can taste much more sweet now because of the sorrow that I’ve felt, and they can taste much more bitter,” Garfield told Cooper. “My feeling towards the world right now, the politics, the culture, where we are as a community, a global community, it can fill me with much more bitterness and sourness and anger and rage. I can feel into my despair a lot more, my hopelessness, and in equal measure, I can feel a far deeper well of hope.”

Garfield has found hope – and support – through his friendships, in nature and in the creative work his mother guided him toward.

“The grief and the loss is the only route to the vitality of being alive,” Garfield said. “The wound is the only route to the gift.”