Grieving A Friend

Hi friend,

It’s the end of an era for Sundance. The film festival, which launched in 1978 and was buoyed by actor Robert Redford, will wrap up its final stint in Park City, Utah this weekend ahead of its relocation to Boulder, Colorado.

According to journalist and former Vanity Fair critic Richard Lawson, the festival’s glory has faded. “A certain warm nostalgia has tinged the air, sure, but it’s been heavily spiked with the bitter sense that we are only walking around in the arid, empty place where something used to be,” he sighs.

Lawson spares no criticism, saying that the films at the festival were overall mediocre-to-bad, barring a few highlights, like Olivia Wilde’s sex comedy The Invite, which has already sold to A24. But, “The Natalie Portman movie stank, the Charli xcx movie was a tedious disappointment…There really was a dearth of good stuff, and a lot of junk. I don’t feel like I saw some revelatory vision from an emergent filmmaker, or witnessed an actor burst into a new era of their career. (Though, Olivia Wilde kinda did, maybe?) All film festivals have their off years, but this has felt different, less like an anomaly and more like a troubling sign of an industry in slow collapse.”

Also in slow collapse: broadcast TV. There’s been a lot of talk about the changes at CBS News, which now sports The Free Press’s Bari Weiss at the helm. The problem CBS and its cohort faces is easy to diagnose. But will a raft of new contributors, including pod guys Andrew Huberman and Peter Attia, be enough to right the ship?

As Weiss put it to CBS staff, “[Audiences] are going to the vast universe of podcasts and YouTube and Twitch and newsletters and, yes, sometimes to our nimbler competitors.” Here’s Axios’s Jim Vandehei with a starker take, “if ur biz is built on shows w/shrinking audiences, made up of old people w/shrinking years left, watching a shrinking medium w/a shrinking future, it’s Mission Impossible. Only a revolutionary/radical shift can adjust this reality.” So: A Hail Mary.

There’s a reason why YouTube is the new home for the Oscars. Because user behavior has shifted. All that’s left is managing the decline. And as some of us learned in the magazine business, radical change may end up simply accelerating things as loyal fans jump ship.

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Your friends at Gloria

The first time Jude Treder-Wolff's friend Maddie (not her real name) was diagnosed with cancer, she fought it, went into remission, and was pronounced cancer-free. Treder-Wolff was with her throughout the journey. The two first met as colleagues, but became very close and remained that way for more than a decade. "We were just in each other's everything, you know?" Treder-Wolff said. Maddie was a single mom, and Jude and her husband never had children of their own, so they got together for holidays, birthdays, and dinners that went late into the night.

Over time, the friendship began to crack. One owed the other money. Communication wasn't what it used to be. When Maddie got a second cancer diagnosis 18 years after the first, Treder-Wolff, then 50, struggled to figure out a relationship that had grown rocky. "I didn't know how to support her in a way that felt helpful to her. I felt like everything I did was wrong," she said. "She was just so angry." When Maddie died, "we really weren't friends anymore," she said, "not because I didn't want to be her friend, because…she just couldn't be with me." 

Another friend pointed out that Maddie had a tendency to push people away when she was hurting, but Treder-Wolff still had a hard time processing the loss. She was grieving for the death of a person, the loss of a friendship, and the rejection of intimacy that she assumed she could still have with Maddie at the end of her life.  

Losing Friends in Midlife

Grieving in middle age can compound the emotions and thoughts that people are already experiencing. "We're aware that we're midlife, but losses are what really remind us," said Dr. Nicole Washington, a psychiatrist who not long ago lost a friend of 35 years.

"When you're in middle age, you're caring for aging parents, you're raising young adult children, and then here you are losing people," Washington said. "You start thinking about your own mortality. It just hits a little different." When we spoke, Dr. Washington's friend had died only four months earlier, so grief was still fresh on her mind. They had known each other since the sixth grade. With time and changing life circumstances, they didn't speak as often as they used to, but remained good friends. 

"Sometimes we fail to realize how important our friends become to us," Washington said. "These are the people that share some of your darkest, deepest secrets. These are the people that you joke about taking some of these stories to the grave," she said, until it literally happens.

Another complication for many people is how removed from death and grieving society has become. According to Dr. Alan Wolfelt, the director of the Center for Loss and Life Transition in Colorado, "In centuries past, aging, illness, death, and grief were more a part of everyday life."

What Makes Grieving Friends So Different?

Gen Xer Jessica Bowen, 49, is a licensed marriage and family therapist with expertise in grief and loss. I asked her whether grieving is different after the death of friends versus family.

"We're fairly unequipped for what it means to process death that isn't familial," Bowen said. "When people have lost a spouse, or a parent, or a child, you're losing a piece of your identity, too," she said. When friends die, however, Bowen said people tend to compartmentalize their grief. "You may not be losing a role because you have so many other attachments: I'm still a mom, I'm still a partner, and I'm still a daughter."

While family relationships can be complicated and messy, there are societal norms about what it means to lose a relative. When it's a friend, your support network doesn't necessarily know or understand the relationship you had to the person you lost.

Amanda Butler, another licensed marriage and family therapist, said she experienced this when comparing how she grieved her father's death versus that of a friend. After her dad died, she, her mother, and her sister talked openly about it, and her friends understood. The family had a funeral and mourned together. When a friend of 15 years died unexpectedly, however, the friendship was complicated, and so was the grief and mourning.

Spencer was a real estate agent who helped Butler find a place to live. What started as a professional friendship became more personal. Sometime around the COVID-19 pandemic, Butler said Spencer sent her messages late at night asking to meet up for drinks, which made her uncomfortable, especially because he was married and had a kid. So she ignored them. "I don't know what was going on in his life," she said. She felt weird about it, and they drifted apart. Then one day in 2024, when Butler was 44, she opened Instagram and saw a post on Spencer's account with his obituary.

He had died in a traffic incident, but she didn't know any details because they didn't have any friends in common that she could ask — a circumstance I've been through as well. She said she planned to attend the funeral at first, but none of her friends could go with her, so she decided against it. "I didn't want to be a random woman showing up there alone having to talk to his wife or other family members who I probably met like once," she said. "There was none of that official closure that comes with the funeral. I had to process it on my own."

The Grief of Comparison

Despite assumptions about reaching a "midlife crisis," coming into middle age is just as much a time of reckoning and reflection as it is of crisis.

As Butler grieved the death of her friend and thought about her own mortality, she started taking stock of where she was in life. "When I look at my life compared to his, he had everything that I could have ever wanted," she said. "He was more successful than me in a lot of ways. In real estate, he made a ton of money. I'm not married but I've always wanted to be — it's just never worked out that way. He had the marriage, the family, the business, and financial success." 

Etsy is where we go for thoughtful, personal gifts that feel unique and not mass-produced or last-minute. For Valentine’s Day, we’re eyeing this customizable embroidered candy-heart sweatshirt, playful scratch-a-sketch cards for kids, and adorable mini heart iron-on patches you can add to a sweater, jacket, or backpack to make something you already own feel special. And for a friend, a simple, removable silk friendship bracelet with sterling silver or gold-filled details is meaningful without being too over-the-top. Shop all of Etsy’s Valentine’s Day finds here. #partner

TO WATCH In the intriguing new movie Send Help (in theaters), Rachel McAdams is a mousy underling struggling to survive the machismo of her office. The tables turn — and things get truly gnarly — when she and her asshole boss are the only survivors of a work flight that crashes on a remote island. On a lighter note: A new comedy series Wonder Man, about an aspiring actor who has to hide his superpowers, is out on Disney+. And the Grammys are this Sunday night and will feature a lot of big performers, including Lauryn Hill in tribute to D’Angelo and Roberta Flack. 

TO SHOP We’re taking advance of Wayfair’s 5 Days of Deals sale to invest in some life-improving upgrades for our kitchen while prices are good. There are pretty dish towels for everyday use, all-purpose kitchen shears to make heavy-duty tasks a cinch, and a sturdy maple cutting board that makes prep easier. It’s all up to 70 percent off. Shop it here. #partner

TO LISTEN We just started this beautifully done podcast (made by Slate and Eureka Street Productions) about a queer-friendly San Francisco church during the height of the AIDS crisis. They worked through a trove of cassette tapes of the services (that were almost thrown away!) to put this together.

TO TRY We’ve been really impressed with the quality and taste of Burlap & Barrel’s spices, particularly this curry blend. It makes delicious stews; start with your base (broth, protein, veggies, coconut milk) and just add a few shakes. It’s leaps and bounds above the curry powder we have from the grocery store.  

“What a big study of teens says about social media – and what it can’t.” • This is a rave review of colonoscopy. • Are microgrants for artists just a return of the patronage system?  • Could not stop reading this.

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