Andrew Garfield is once again opening up about his grief following the death of his mother.
“It is very, very difficult, I think with a loss like that the world gets rearranged and I say that knowing I am not unique in that experience,” the actor tells the UK’s Channel 4. Garfield, 38, lost his mother Lynn to cancer in 2019, just as filming his Oscar-nominated performance “Tick, Tick….Boom” began.
“It’s so strange because it feels very unique when it is happening, it feels like, ‘oh my God, I’m the only person that’s ever lost their mother’, because it does feel so lonely and precise,” the actor says. “It feels just like a precise agony and for a period of time I didn’t want to, and I wasn’t able to, do anything. I was kind of wasted and the world didn’t make sense, and it still doesn’t, because I miss her greatly, and I hope it never makes sense because I always want to miss her.”
The actor continues, adding that Lynn was all about “small kindnesses in life” – something he hopes to embody in his own life.
“If I’m short-tempered with someone, if I’m having a rough day and someone walks past me and they’re nice to me and I’m gruff, I will feel a little hand on my shoulder,” Garfield says. “It will be my mother’s hand, and I hear her say, ‘Andrew …’, and I’ll go back and I’ll say, ‘Hey, sorry, that was a bit rude of me.’ I hope she never takes a hand off my shoulder in that way.”
The actor’s view on grief following the death of a loved one became a viral video after he shared his thoughts on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” last year, telling Stephen Colbert to cry over his mother while speaking about her was a “beautiful thing”.
“This is all the unexpressed love, the grief that will remain with us until we pass because we never get enough time with each other, right? No matter if someone lives until 60, 15, or 99. So 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. We all told her every day she was the best of us,” he said at the time.
