At 83, Michael Friedman blogs about grief and ‘being old’

Michael Friedman takes issue with the word “grief.”

“It’s misleading. It’s this lovely, soft word: grief,” he said. “Nothing lovely or soft about it.”

It’s more than being sad. It’s feeling lonely even when others are around. It comes up all at once, in random moments throughout the day. It wakes Friedman in the middle of the night and makes him curse and scream and cry.

It’s painful, and it still doesn’t seem to ease, more than a year after his wife of almost 49 years, Harriet, died of pancreatic cancer.

Since last fall, Friedman has shared his feelings about loss and being a widower, along with the realities of aging, on his Substack, “One (Very) Old Man: Thoughts as I Near the End of My Life.” The stigma surrounding aging and death prevents people from receiving the support they need, he says. So he writes about what he wishes he’d known to help others prepare.

Friedman’s words resonate with an audience beyond Baltimore. The free blog has more than 2,000 subscribers across 32 states and more than 17 countries. Its posts have attracted more than 65,500 page views since the blog launched a year ago.

In the comments, readers thank Friedman for equipping them for the inevitable.

‘Grief is hard’

They had thought she would be a widow. Friedman, 83, has multiple health conditions; Harriet was healthy. “I wasn’t ready at all, nor was she, for her to be the partner who would die,” he said. He didn’t know what to expect, and then it all happened so fast.

“If I had thought about it, I suppose I would have known that grief is hard,” he said.

Friedman spent decades as a social worker, mental health advocate and professor in New York. He moved to Baltimore in 2019 with his wife to be near their daughter and grandchildren. He started the Substack because he had “things to say,” and his posts draw on his knowledge of psychology and the healthcare system.

But what sets his current dispatches apart from what he used to write is the emphasis on firsthand experience.

Many of his posts focus on coping with death. He says the older you get, the more people you care about will die. Grief, in one form or another, becomes part of life.

In a January post titled “I Was Not Ready For Death. Are You?” Friedman wrote about the “emotional onslaught” that accompanied Harriet’s diagnosis and death: the acute loneliness he feels every time he remembers she is not here and the anger he feels “at the universe,” the healthcare system and her for abandoning him.

Harriet was strong and brave when confronted with her diagnosis, he recounted. “During that time, it was, needless to say, more than a little painful for me,” Friedman said. Yet he struggled to find support for his own deteriorating mental health in conversations with his doctors or with the workers in his wife’s palliative and hospice care.

“It seems to me that the medical profession could pay a lot more attention to the person who is about to be bereaved,” he said. In another post, “What Can Doctors Do to Help Their Patients Cope with Dying and Death?” he offered recommendations to medical professionals.

Geriatricians should be more proactive in helping their patients deal with death, he says. He recommends that clinics develop and distribute brochures about aging and dying, and expand access to therapy and counseling services.

“I don’t know how well people understand grief. I don’t think I did,” he said.

Readers are sympathetic. They range from friends and acquaintances in the mental health advocacy world to neighbors and strangers living through a similar experience.

Dr. Susan Lehmann, the director of the Geriatric Psychiatry Clinic at Johns Hopkins, met Friedman soon after he moved to Baltimore at a meeting of experts discussing mental health and aging in Maryland. What drew her to the blog was how candidly Friedman writes about loss and adjusting to change.

“Our fellow human beings often can express things that touch us the most,” Lehmann said. Caregivers’ mental health and older adults as a whole often receive less attention.

“I think his writing humanizes common experiences. [His posts] are not depressing because he also thinks very widely on a range of subjects, talks about things really thoughtfully and can put into words the experiences that many people might relate to.”

The country is aging rapidly. By 2030, all baby boomers will be over 65, making up about 20% of the country’s population, according to U.S. Census projections. In Maryland, the state’s Department of Aging estimates that 1 in 4 Marylanders will be over 65 by 2030. Friedman’s main criticism is that the healthcare system seems ill prepared to talk about older adults’ issues.

“It seems to me that there is excessive optimism about aging,” he said. To oversimplify, he said, people say that, if you sleep and eat well, get enough exercise and practice mindfulness, “you’ll never age.” People seem to dismiss the realities of aging, specifically older adults’ physical and mental decline, in favor of focusing on whatever potential “great lives” older people can live, Friedman said.

“Horse--t,” he deadpanned. “The human body wears out.”

Over lunch every other week, Friedman and Steven Sharfstein, 84, the retired chief executive of Sheppard Pratt, a nonprofit mental health system in Maryland, and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, talk shop.

“It’s a taboo subject. It’s something people don’t like to talk about: getting old, becoming infirm and dying,” Sharfstein said. “We need, as a society, to have much more of a comfort level to be able to talk about it and reach out.”

Friedman writes to help himself, but he wants to help others. He reminds readers to find joy and meaning amid the day-to-day difficulties of “being old.”

When loneliness becomes too overwhelming, Friedman goes to Keystone Korner, where he is the house photographer, to listen to jazz and socialize. Once a month, his band plays a show at Benny’s in Little Italy.

In those moments, he feels reconnected and deeply satisfied. “There are times when I’m playing and times when I’m working on my photographs where it’s an experience that takes me beyond myself,” he said. “Takes me beyond the immediate world.”

And, he says, it takes him beyond just “being old.”