Lessons In Modern Grief from David Gest and that Horny Kangaroo

Grief is many-shaped thing, a thin film that settles over our lives in different ways. There's that howling grief, that sore-to-the-bones grief, where the air you suck in feels thicker, somehow, like a vital part of you has been tugged away irretrievably, lost to the tides of the sea; there's that long-burn grief, the kind that burns slow and lengthy, a hot furnace of grief that fuels and moulds everything you do for months afterwards; the distant grief of someone you love but never met dying, a music icon or an actor, intangible grief, grief without a shape or a motive but grief nonetheless, a feeling too big to process, too small to truly consider real; sudden grief, shock grief; that grief that only hits you when you lose your first pet.

And grief makes us do strange things: some of us pucker up and go silent, others want to talk and revel in the joy of the person lost. Grief makes us cut our hair and clear out our homes and go to Australia and find ourselves. Grief makes us slip into the grooves of those old familiar routines, quietly eating the same breakfast-lunch-dinner off the same tray every single day until we, also, die. Sometimes the only thing you can do is watch Bargain Hunt in stunned silence. Sometimes you can only drink sweet tea and shake. Sometimes you fuck a dead kangaroo.

Listen the thi— I really want you to come into this without an agenda. Erase the prejudices from your mind. You're there like: I feel fucking a dead kangaroo is an inappropriate reaction to grief. You're all: I have not even fucked a kangaroo once, dead or nay. You're coming to this all wrong.

Because look at this photo of a kangaroo holding his dead kangaroo wife, a photo taken by Australian Evan Switzer, a photo that went viral due to the heartstrings it collectively pulled, just look at it first beat as his tiny frail kangaroo boy looks sadly on, and go: this is a sad photo, a photo full of despair, animals expressing human grief.

And then look at this one and— oh, oh no. Oh, no no no. Oh no. No.

That kangaroo is trynna fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

"The male is clearly highly stressed and agitated, his forearms are very wet from him licking himself to cool down," Australia Museum principle research scientist Mark Eldridge wrote in a museum blog. "He is also sexually aroused: the evidence is here sticking out from behind the scrotum (yes, in marsupials the penis is located behind the scrotum)."

He added that the male kangaroo is not "propp[ing] up her head so she could see her joey before she died," but instead, "this is a male trying to get a female to stand up so he can mate with her."

I have just learned a lot about kangaroos in the space of those three or four sentences, there. First: male kangaroos have their dicks on backwards. Second: male kangaroos are savage. This male kangaroo could use those last dying glimmers of the female kangaroo's life – as the synapses fail and snap, as the heart slows and stops beating, the nerves growing dull now, drifting into something heavier than sleep – to show her one last glimpse of her precious son, one last look at the thing she hath create. But nah he wants to fuck. Third, most importantly: apparently kangaroos grieve quite differently to us.

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Put that on the backburner. Revel in this clip from Celebrity Big Brother this week, when David Bowie's estranged ex-wife was informed of his death, and then told Tiffany Pollard that "David had died", and Tiffany assumed she meant fellow housemate David Gest has died, because that really seems like something David Gest would do, and:

Again, a lot to unpackage. First and most fundamentally: David Gest does have the exact vibe of someone capable of dying at a moment's notice, especially in the middle of a dire reality show. Wouldn't that be the most David Gest thing David Gest ever did? To straight-up die? On Celebrity Big Brother? That is so David Gest, peak David Gest. The only thing more David Gest than dying on Celebrity Big Brother is marrying Liza Minelli, which he already did. That was the ceiling on David Gest's Gestiness up until that time he nearly died on Celebrity Big Brother. David Gest has reached every inch and every cubit of his potential, thus far. The only way he can exceed it is dying alone in a single bed in a large bedroom in Elstree while Gemma Collins unplugs his bear-sized sleep inhaler so she can use the socket for her hair curlers. In a way, it is rude for David Gest to die in any other way. In a way, he should have to compete in every Celebrity Big Brother – or I'm A Celebrity…, or Celebrity Come Dine With Me, or Hole in the Wall, or Celebrity The Chase, or Countdown – until he dies in full and glorious HD. No: I want to see David Gest's final moments in 4K. In IMAX.

Second: imagine being trapped in a large house with David Gest's slowly exhaling corpse.

Because that was the horror facing Tiffany Pollard in the above clip. Imagine, for a moment, the twisting terror of Angie Bowie holding you in a tight grip while – you assume – David Gest's cool pink body lies lifeless in the bedroom next to you. You would freak the fuck out. You would scream and thrash and cry. You would run to the warm linen comfort of Christopher Maloney's big grey tracksuit. Come into the tracksuit, hen. Shush yourself in the trackie. David Gest and the slow beating bull heart of nan-loving X Factor turn-down Christopher Maloney is the only sweet comfort you have. In that moment, Tiffany Pollard was experiencing horrors and discomfort not known to the average human. Horrors unknown.

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Been a weird week for grief, on the whole, underlining what I've known for a long time: there's just no right way to grieve, is there. When David Bowie died there were people lining up to tell us how to grieve – Not Too Loudly, You Didn't Know Him, You're Not 10 Years Old, Grow Up, This Is Hysterical, Actually David Bowie Was Bad, He Took A Lot Of Gak In The 70s And Was Slightly More Into Nazis Than Is Ideal, Your Grief Isn't Real, This Is Just Posturing – but people reacted by holding a half-sombre, half-confused dance vigil in Brixton. When that kangaroo died another kangaroo tried to fuck it. When David Gest almost died people were like 'yeah, that sounds like something he'd do' but also 'I am confused about how to feel about a man I have been locked in a house with for six days dying, because in literally any other circumstances that would be the climax to a really real horror movie' and also 'oh, that's quite sad'.

Grief takes many forms – it's a very immediate, very visceral, and thankfully quite rare feeling, a raw and overwhelming emotion, one that shoots down the nerves and overtakes the brain, makes the body as heavy as the heart – and people will always tell you how to cope with it. But it is a shape-shifting thing, a different weight in separate people's hands, and we cope with it how we cope with it. Sometimes, you get so sad you fuck a kangaroo. Sometimes you threaten to slap Angie Bowie. Sometimes you're just sad outside a cinema in Brixton. You do you, grief-havers. You do you.

@joelgolby

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