Bareback on Grief: Thank You, Bobby
When I first heard of Bob Weir’s death, I wasn’t ready. As a death worker, it’s my ethos to allow grief, and yet each loss casts its own strange, unrepeatable constellation of emotion. Grief is like riding a mythical creature you’ve imagined, but hoped you’d never see in real life. Much like a live Grateful Dead show, grief’s an unpredictable adventure.
I spent about 12 hours totally numb. Grief is so profound that part of the psyche wonders whether it will survive such excruciating tenderness. Like many of us, when I “run”, I numb. But, there’s always a turning point when numbness yields, expansion ensues, and I climb bareback onto that mythical creature and fucking ride.
Yesterday morning, I put on the DVD of the Grateful Dead’s October 1980 Radio City show, which opens with an extraordinary acoustic set, including To Lay Me Down.
To lay me down, to lay me down one last time...
Bam.
I spent the rest of the day crying tears of sadness and joy and gratitude in equal measure. Thank you, Bobby, for facilitating an experience of grief that didn’t ask me to label emotion one way or another. My tears fell like rainbows woven from every possible feeling— nonhierarchical, simultaneous.
I know this part of the journey is just beginning, but fortunately, there are sixty years of GD music to help us enjoy the ride.
I’m a relatively young Dead Head. I was four years old when Jerry died. In my twenties, I orbited the community, exploring psychedelia, tagging along to shows with my more official Dead Head friends. I’m so grateful to them for bringing me close. But it took another decade of living to find my own devotion.
Two years ago, I walked away from a life I expected to carry my future. The direction I’d been traveling was incompatible with who I am, and my soul, graciously, had had enough. In tandem, I experienced an explosion of consciousness that altered the fabric of my reality. I surrendered my life as I knew it. In that total consumption- a grief so large it swallowed me whole- I truly found the Dead.
There were days when the world felt so inhospitable, I wondered if it was worth sticking around. On those days, the only thing I could recognize was the Grateful Dead. For months, most of my waking hours were chaperoned by their music. Their lyrics taught me how to live inside mystery without needing answers. Somewhere in that communion, I resolved that one way or another, the darkness had to give.
I credit the Dead with healing my relationship with my twin sister at this time, too. We’d been estranged for years prior, and it was the music, the live show experience, that gave us common ground in which to meet each other anew.
As any Head knows, there is nothing like the live experience of Grateful Dead music. I began going to as many shows as I could. It was in those rooms that I came back to life. I don’t want to explain why. If you know you know, and if you don’t, there’s still time to discover for yourself.
What’s always been literal about the Dead is that death and dying (and therefore living) are inseparable from the band and the fandom. As someone committed to honoring death as a sacred inevitability that fertilizes our capacity for presence and compassion, so that we can truly live, this aspect of Dead culture feels like home.
I’ve been imagining what it was like at Bobby’s bedside in his final days, and while I don’t know for sure, I can pretty confidently infer that his transition included courage, curiosity, and a type of relief that results from a true bond with the eternal. I honor his death as his last gift to the world, of which he left so, so many.
I am beyond blessed to have attended over twenty shows in 2025, including Dead & Co’s three GD60 in San Francisco, which would be Bobby’s final. My heart is held in the knowing that the music’s immortal, that we will gather, remember, and continue to dance through the full spectrum of living and dying, together.
Thank you for everything, Bobby. God Bless the Grateful Dead.