Grief is one of life’s most destabilizing experiences – and we all navigate it at some point, through death and change alike.
Actress Aubrey Plaza has been wading through loss herself this year, following her husband Jeff Baena’s death by suicide in January. While appearing on Amy Poehler’s “Good Hang” podcast this week to promote her newest movie, “Honey, Don’t!,” Plaza spoke about the journey she’s been on since Baena died – and the many forms grief has taken on throughout.
At one point, she likened it to a scene from “The Gorge,” a 2025 sci-fi horror/romance. “In the movie, there’s, like, a cliff on one side and there’s a cliff on the other side. Then there’s a gorge. And it’s filled with … monster people that are trying to get” the film’s protagonists, Plaza said. “When I watched it, I was like, ‘That feels like what my grief is like – or what grief could be like.’”
Later, she compared the sensation of loss to “a giant ocean of awfulness, that’s, like, right there, and I can see it. Sometimes, I just want to dive into it, and just, like, be in it. Then sometimes, I just look at it. And sometimes, I try to get away from it.”
“But,” Plaza added, “it’s always there.”
That last bit has held true for actress Regina King, who spoke last year about her experience with losing someone to suicide. The relentlessness of grief ultimately changed her. “I’m a different person now than I was” before her son, Ian Alexander Jr., died in 2022, she admitted.
There’s a reason why Plaza’s metaphors cast grief as intimidatingly gigantic and murky.
So what else can one do, in the face of it, but put one foot in front of the other? Plaza says she’s content with that for the time being. “Overall, I’m here and I’m functioning. I feel really grateful to be moving through the world. I think I’m okay. But it’s, like, a daily struggle – obviously.”
(Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore, Wikimedia Commons)