Finding Space to Grieve: The Story Behind Whale Fall

The loss of your father is at the heart of this piece. Looking back, how did you navigate your grief, and how did that journey influence the creation of Whale Fall?

I'm gonna start with the last part of the question because I think Whale Fall is precisely how I navigate grief. When my father died, a lot was happening in my family.

 

My mum had cancer at the time, so all of our attention was on her treatment and her health. Then my dad got sick very suddenly. He was hospitalised and died, and we were completely unprepared for it. He was the pillar of our family.

 

After he died, there were so many practical things that had to be taken care of, especially because my mom was still going through treatment.

 

I suddenly found myself dealing with all this bureaucracy that I didn't even know existed. It was overwhelming. I really felt like I had no place and no time to stop and grieve simply.

 

I started asking myself, how could I create a place for myself? A place and a time where I could actually mourn?

 

I'm not a religious person, so I don't have religious traditions around death in my family. I do practice Buddhism, so I was reading a lot about death, loss, and impermanence, but I didn't have a community that I could lean on.

 

So studying death, grief, and mourning, and writing about them, which eventually became this play, was my way of creating that space for myself. It became my way of permitting myself to grieve.

 

 

How has grief shown up for you—physically, emotionally, in your daily life?

 

Grief has shown up in my life in many different ways since my father died. At first, it was mostly shock. Everything was so overwhelming.

 

About a month after he died, I had a tour with another show. When he was still in the hospital, I had decided not to go. But after he passed away, my mum and my brother convinced me that I should.

 

So I ended up in a tiny village in Turkey. It was incredibly beautiful, and it was such a beautiful experience. I remember realising that it was possible to be incredibly sad and incredibly happy at the same moment.

 

That changed something for me. It helped me understand that grief isn't logical, and it certainly isn't linear.

 

For a long time, I would have these sudden realisations, almost as if I was hearing the news for the first time all over again. I would think, "Oh... my father died." And it would hit me with the same force, and I would just cry my eyes out.

 

I also experienced something that I later learned is actually quite common. Even though I never saw my father in his coffin, I would suddenly have intrusive images of him dead.

 

They would appear at the strangest moments and sometimes trigger anxiety attacks.

 

Then, when my mum recovered from her cancer and I finally felt like I could relax a little about her health, I fell into a very deep depression. It was almost as if I had been holding everything together for so long that, once I finally felt safe enough, everything collapsed.

 

I called my doctor right away and started taking care of it. So grief has never been just one thing for me. It's changed shape over the years.

 

It has been shock, sadness, anxiety, depression, love, beauty, and moments of unexpected joy. That's one of the things I've learned from it. It doesn't follow any rules.

 

 

The show begins with a deeply personal loss. At what point did grief become something you wanted to explore through theatre rather than keep private?

 

I never actually set out to write a play. As I said, I started reading about death, mourning, and grief because I was trying to create a space for myself to grieve. But I'm a very curious person. I'm very nerdy.

 

And I became completely fascinated by everything I was discovering, especially the ways different cultures deal with death. So I started writing. I was writing about what I was learning, but also about what I was feeling.

 

I showed some of those texts to a few friends, and one of them said, "You know, I think this should become a play."

 

At first I resisted the idea because I'm not a huge fan of autobiographical or autofictional performances. They usually aren't the kind of theatre that interests me the most. But then I thought, maybe my own experience could be a Trojan horse.

 

Maybe people would come because they're interested in this personal story, and once they're there, I can take them on this much bigger journey through death, through different funeral traditions, through different ways of understanding mortality, and what it means to die. That was the moment I realised the play wasn't really about me.

 

My story was simply the doorway into a conversation that belongs to all of us.

 

 

Have you encountered people who were hesitant to see a show about death? What would you say to them?

 

There are surprisingly a lot of people who are hesitant to see a show about death, especially one that, in São Paulo, takes place in a cemetery.

 

We perform it in a chapel inside a cemetery, and for some people that's immediately intimidating. What I usually tell them is, first of all, I completely respect that hesitation.

 

I think it's a very natural reaction. In fact, the show is exactly about that. It's about our resistance to death, our discomfort with talking about it, even saying the word.

 

So I invite people to look at that resistance with a sense of humour, with curiosity, with lightness, and just see where it takes them.

 

Some people don't go to cemeteries because of religious beliefs, past trauma, or very personal reasons. And that's absolutely fine. I would never try to convince someone to ignore those feelings.

 

I'm very respectful of where people are in their relationship with death because it's such a personal journey.

 

I'm in the middle of my own journey, and I happened to choose to study it and make theatre about it. But I know not everyone is in the same place, or at the same moment in that journey. So whatever someone's reaction is to a show about death, I think it's valid.

 

 

If audiences leave having one conversation they were not having before, what would you hope it would be?

 

I really want this show to encourage people to talk about death more openly. Not only because I genuinely believe that if we bring death into the light, but we can learn from it and become more familiar with the fact that we are going to die and that we're going to lose the people we love.

 

Of course, we all know that intellectually. But trying to ignore it, pretending it's not there, I think only creates more suffering.

 

I also think that, once people start talking about death, they can begin talking about so many other things that are deeply important and very practical.

 

How would you like to die? How would you like to be treated at the end of your life? Have you thought about palliative care? Have you left your affairs in order? Have you made it easier for the people you love to deal with everything they'll have to face after your death?

 

Those conversations can spare people so much stress and uncertainty.

 

When we talk about death in the daylight instead of hiding it away, we can prepare better, both emotionally and practically.

 

Through this process, I've also become very engaged with the palliative care community, with patients' rights, with advance directives, and with the right to assisted dying. These are conversations that really matter to me.

 

So I think talking about death has much bigger and much more practical consequences than we usually imagine. That's one of the things I hope people take away from the show.

 

Whale Fall is performing at Lindisfarne Room at St Cuthbert's Church during the Edinburgh Fringe. You can buy tickets here.