When grief feels like fear
“It’s terminal” is never a good phrase to hear – unless it’s followed by a number like 1, or for those of you who collect Avios points, Terminal 5. But these were the words said to me back in 2015, not by an air steward but by my mum, who was battling cancer at the time.
That moment changed my life. And in the years since, I’ve learned that grief doesn’t just end when someone dies – it evolves into something else entirely. This November, I’m growing a moustache for Movember. Not for the questionable facial hair, but because men’s health matters, and too many of us still struggle in silence. If I can write this and help at least one person speak to someone or reach out for help, then it’s all worth it.
Many people are surprised to learn that I suffer from anxiety. How can someone who appears confident have anxiety?
Well, I’ve spent a long time trying to understand where this anxiety comes from, and C.S. Lewis gave me an answer I wasn’t expecting. He wrote, “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.” When I first read that, it made sense. Because that’s exactly what it felt like after losing my mum. The grief didn’t just make me sad – it made me afraid. Afraid of losing someone else. Afraid of forgetting. Afraid of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, not being enough. That fear didn’t stay contained to big, obvious worries. It seeped into everything. Now I sit at night and ponder about something I said two weeks ago – critically analysing every single way it can be interpreted, mentally running different scenarios in my head and then working out how many of them are bad. I know it sounds excessive. It is excessive. But it happens most weeks.
The way I’ve dealt with this has ranged from screaming at the top of my lungs in my garden to seeking therapy to medication like sertraline – all with varying degrees of success. The screaming was surprisingly good for short-term relief, but I wouldn’t recommend doing it in the office. The point is, there are many ways to manage mental health – and here at CACI, we’re fortunate to have mental health first aiders who are trained to listen and support colleagues who might be struggling. It’s one of the many resources available to help us look after ourselves and each other.
Films, grief, and crying
I’m not afraid to say I cry. God, I quite enjoy it sometimes. In the same way that after a Sunday league game you stretch to alleviate the inevitable strain, I sometimes watch a film to alleviate pent-up emotion that creeps up on you or that you neglect. There are many films I love, but certain ones I only watch when I need a good cry – and these films tend to be thematically consistent. Grief.
One of these is Coco. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a Pixar film about memory, family, and what happens when we forget the people we’ve lost. There’s a song in it called “Remember Me” – about keeping someone alive through memory and through simply not letting them fade away. When you lose someone, especially someone as fundamental as a parent, there’s this quiet terror that creeps in. Not just the grief of them being gone, but the fear that one day you’ll forget. You’ll forget the exact way they laughed, or how they said your name, or the specific advice they gave you that one time. I still have backed-up voicemails from 2015 of my mum giving me a rollocking for staying out too long. I’ve never deleted them. Sometimes I listen to them – not because I enjoy being told off, but because I need to hear her voice. I need to remember that she was real, that she was here, that she cared enough to worry about me stumbling in at 3 am. Those mundane, annoying, everyday moments? They become sacred when they’re all you have left. That’s what gets me about Coco. It’s about this reminder that love doesn’t end when someone dies. It transforms. It becomes the stories you tell, the voicemails you can’t bring yourself to delete, the way I now end every phone call with “I love you” because they can’t anymore. And that transformation isn’t something that happens once and you call it a day.
Rebuilding yourself
There’s a quote from About Time that stays with me. Tim’s dad talks about playing every day as if it were an ordinary day, and then playing it again, knowing it’s his last time. The essence is about living each day twice: once normally, and once with the awareness that it might be your last time doing something so ordinary and beautiful. That awareness, it’s something grief forces on you whether you want it or not. And once you have it, you can’t go back to who you were before.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote: “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to.” And she’s right. I’m not the same person I was before 2015. Back then, I was worrying about packing a Team of the Season on FIFA – I apologise that this reference is probably more relatable to people of a certain age. Now I have a moustache and work a 9-5 in Location Analytics. The anxiety, the overthinking, the need to tell my family I love them every single time we speak – these aren’t flaws to fix. They’re part of how I’ve rebuilt myself around the loss. That need to say “I love you” – it comes from a specific place. I never used to tell my dad, my sister, my mum that I loved them – or maybe I did, but not often enough. When you lose someone, there’s always a part of you that questions whether you loved them enough. So now, whenever I speak to my dad or my sister, I tell them I love them. Because you never know when this privilege you take for granted will be ripped away from you.
Why Movember is important?
There’s an old saying: no man eats the same stew twice, for it’s not the same stew and he’s not the same man. That’s what Movember means to me. You can grow a moustache each November, but you’re never quite the same person growing it. Times change, grief changes you, and the moustache is just the visible part of that transformation.
Movember at CACI
My name is Jake Chase and I’m an Associate Consultant in the Location Analytics team at CACI. I’m really proud to be leading on organising and running activities this month for Movember and we’re doing more than just growing a mean moustache. We’re creating spaces to actually talk – whether that’s over coffee in the morning or at a Thirsty Thursday (drinks at the end of the workday in our office kitchen). Because sometimes the most important conversations happen when you’re just sat with a brew, not trying to fix anything.
If you’d like to support the cause, you can donate to our team.