Grief Gave Me a Pen
Narrative
Before 2025 ends, I find myself standing at the crossroads of memory and cinema, looking back at a film that feels less like a biopic and more like a mirror held up to the fractured anatomy of my own soul. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) is often criticized for its chronological "creative liberties," but to focus on the timeline is to miss the heartbeat. The film is a masterclass in the loneliness of the spotlight, the devastation of self-sabotage, and the grueling, uphill climb toward familial redemption. Watching Rami Malek’s Freddie Mercury navigate the meteoric rise of Queen is a visceral experience, but it is his internal collapse—his search for belonging in a world that only wants his "show"—that strikes the loudest chord.
The film operates on a frequency of high-octane performance and low-frequency sorrow. We see Farrokh Bulsara, a man trying to outrun his past, his name, and the rigid expectations of his father. He reinvents himself as Freddie Mercury, a god of the stage, but the movie poignantly illustrates that no matter how loud seventy thousand people at Live Aid cheer, they cannot fill the silence of an empty house. Freddie’s journey is one of excess followed by an agonizingly quiet realization: that the people who knew you before the world loved you are the only ones who can save you when the world stops looking.
This cinematic journey into the depths of grief and identity became my unintended companion through the wreckage of my own recent history.
In 2023, the floor fell out from beneath my life.
I lost Matt—my dearest friend, my anchor, my "Mary Austin" in a world of strangers. He didn’t die of a long, poetic illness. He died of a brain aneurysm. One moment he was there, a vibrant consciousness, and the next, he was a memory. Fuck brain aneurysms. There is a specific kind of cruelty in a death that gives you no time to say goodbye, a sudden biological glitch that robs a person of their future in a heartbeat. Like the scene where Freddie receives his diagnosis, there is a "before" and an "after," and the "after" is a cold, hollow place.
In the wake of Matt’s death, I spiraled. The grief turned into a heavy, suffocating depression that made the simple act of existing feel like an insurmountable chore. To make matters worse, my relationship with my mother fractured. We fell into a cycle of misunderstanding and bitter arguments—the kind of jagged words that leave scars. It got so dark that the physical body finally surrendered to the mental anguish. I collapsed. I had stopped eating, my body wasting away under the weight of a spirit that didn’t want to be fed. Like Freddie in his Munich years, I was surrounded by noise but dying of starvation for genuine connection.
But Bohemian Rhapsody teaches us that the "rhapsody" isn't just about the music; it’s about the return. There is a pivotal moment in the film where Freddie, humbled and broken, returns home. He tells his father, "Good thoughts, good words, good deeds," finally honoring the heritage he spent a decade fleeing. He realizes that despite the friction, despite the years of not being understood, his family is the bedrock.
I reached that same realization. No matter the arguments, no matter the distance created by depression, she is my mother still. Whatever happens, the cord that binds us is stronger than the trauma that tried to sever it. I gave in. I chose to forgive, not because the past was perfect, but because the future is too short to spend in a state of war. We reconnected, and in that reconnection, I found a strange, frantic fuel.
The pain of losing Matt and the raw vulnerability of my reconciliation with my mother transformed into an obsession. I didn't just start writing; I became a conduit for every unsaid word I ever owed Matt and every emotion I had buried. I wrote until my fingers ached and the sun came up. I submitted my soul to every e-magazine, every e-journal, and every newspaper that would listen. I became like Queen in the studio—refusing to follow the "formula," pushing for the six-minute operatic madness of my own truth. I was no longer just a victim of an aneurysm’s cruelty or a daughter/son in conflict; I was a writer.
The lesson of both the film and my life is that we are all "misfits belonging to misfits." Freddie Mercury died, but he did so having repaired his soul. Matt is gone, and the anger I feel toward the unfairness of his death will never truly vanish, but his life is now a permanent ink on my pages.
As 2025 draws to a close, I look at the stack of submissions and the scars on my heart with a sense of wholesome, albeit exhausted, pride. Life, like a Queen song, is often chaotic, loud, and nonsensical. It involves sudden tragedies and deep depressions. But if you can find the courage to go back to the people who love you, and if you can turn your "fucking shit" moments into art, then you’ve won. The show must go on, but it’s a much better show when you’re no longer performing alone.
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