Andrew Garfield shares the gift he’s discovered in grieving his mother

Andrew Garfield speaks with Anderson Cooper about how grief is now the only way for him to feel close to his mom again.

Andrew Garfield is generous with his grief. Not that one’s mourning process should be assigned value by others, but Garfield’s ability to so lovingly and poetically express his grief for his mother, Linda, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2019, offers a gift of connection, and, perhaps, catharsis, to anyone experiencing loss. “My mother’s qualities that were the most kind of obvious, or apparent, were a gentleness, a kindness, a generosity,” Garfield told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in a thoughtful discussion for the third season of the podcast “All There Is.” “On her hospice bed, she was more concerned with the nurses than she was with her own pain and discomfort. She was that kind of person.” When the actor spoke about his mother’s death during a 2021 appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” since viewed more than 2 million times on YouTube, his vulnerability seemed to touch the hearts of many who were themselves grieving loved ones during the pandemic. “I hope this grief stays with me, because it’s all the unexpressed love that I didn’t get to tell her, and I told her every day,” Garfield said at the time. “She was the best of us.” The grief has stayed with him, as he hoped, in the nearly five years since his mother died.