So nearly two years have passed and yes, I am still banging on about this. There’s an assumption that by the time you get to this point, you’ll be over it and everyone can move on. You only have to look at the types of films/soap operas we watch to know that we like a happy ending, a resolution, for the bad guy to be held to account and for things to be packaged up into neat little Bridget Jones-shaped boxes. But grief isn’t like that, it’s not linear, there’s no logic, and it’s messy and unpredictable.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m doing ok, I’ve tried really hard not to be defined by this awful thing that’s happened to me and I’m living and loving and trying to make it count. My beautiful girls are doing well and have been such an amazing support it takes my breath away, I’m so proud of them, as he would have been. But it hasn’t been easy, it still isn’t easy and one of the things that makes it so hard is our reluctance, as a society, to talk about death.
Why don’t we talk about death?
If I’d had a baby two years ago, or got divorced, or won the lottery, or had a car crash, or any other life-changing event, people would still be asking me about it, yet not everyone will experience these things. But, at the risk of coming across as a proper Debbie Downer, every single one of us will, at some point, have to say goodbye to someone we love. So let’s get better at it.
I still use the D-word as much as possible. Using it takes the mystery away from something that is talked about in whispers. We’ve got much better when it comes to sex education and we teach our young people how life starts, but we never talk about when it ends. Of course, we need to talk about death in an age-appropriate way, in terms children understand, but like sex and birth, it needs to be part of the conversation from fairly young, instead of waiting until someone dies, when there are so many new emotions flying around.
The challenges of grief
Grief is so isolating, and when people walk around it and don’t mention it, it can make that isolation worse. I know it’s hard to navigate as I don’t want it to be the centre of every conversation, I am so much more than ‘that woman whose husband died’, but then it also feels like there’s this huge dark hole that we’re all ignoring, and I can sense the awkwardness. I often feel that unless I’m with close friends and family I can’t mention my husband, that I’m boring them, that I should be showing that I’ve moved on, and this makes me feel guilty. But part of my world stopped, while everyone else’s carried on and for a while I felt that I had nothing left, even though everything was still there, so I need to acknowledge that; you need to let me acknowledge that.
Grief is like an open wound, when it first happens anything that touches it is incredibly painful. It rips off a layer that you never really get back; you’re fragile and raw and vulnerable and things hurt more than they used to. Then, ever so slowly, you start to experience good things again, and each one of these tiny things lays a layer over the grief, so that the wound doesn’t hurt every time it brushes against something and at some point, on a good day, you find you can even touch it and study it without it causing you pain. The scar will always be there and always be tender, but there might be times when eventually you – just for a while – forget it’s there, or there’ll be times when you look at it and it doesn’t remind you of pain, but of the amazing thing you were doing when you obtained it, and that can make you smile.
The power of love and friendship and how much it meant to me
Bereavement shines a spotlight on your relationships, and I’ve been showered with so much love and support from the people around me, I feel really lucky. There’s the friend who came to the funeral directors with me and waited in the foyer for an hour while I talked to the coffin, the friend who texted me one weekend to tell me to be ready in an hour because we were taking some alpacas for a walk, the friend who sends me funny voice messages every day, the friends who still check in way after the ‘honeymoon period’ of grief has passed; the friends who fed me, drank with me, danced with me, and the ones who cried and swore and listened and just sat in silence with me. I’m grateful for them all and how they’re not afraid of the tears, the anger, the repetition.
Supporting a grieving person isn’t easy and I’m aware that our relationships have often been very one-sided. You feel broken, and the slightest thing makes you cry; but then you also feel impenetrable; you’ve survived this huge thing that turned your world upside down, so you barely flinch at the other stuff life throws at you, and you become a bit numb. This can be hard to handle, for yourself and the people around you.
At the same time, I’ve had new people come into my life, and new experiences, and I’ve done things I wouldn’t have done if he was still alive – not because he would have stopped me, but because I’ve had to find a new way of being me, of being happy. When someone first dies there’s nothing you can do to stop the pain, it’s like childbirth and you know that when it hits you it will take your breath away and you just have to breathe through it and trust your body will do its thing. Then eventually you claw back some control.
Living with grief (and what not to say!)
I’ve talked before about controlled explosions of grief because we still need to function; we have jobs and children and we need to live our lives, and you really can’t cry and rage all day every day. You must let a bit of it go, like in Titanic when Rose lets go of Jack on that stupid (and massive – just saying) door so that she could live. I owe it to my husband to live.
When someone you love dies, it’s tempting to close your heart off. You want to protect it, as though it’s made of the finest, most fragile porcelain. If you don’t let anyone near it then it can’t be broken, and you’ll never have to go through that pain again. But closing it off in this way also closes it off to the good things out there and what’s the point of going through all of this if you just shut yourself away? How is that honouring everything my husband stood for? His heart stopped, but mine carried on.
We never know when our last moments will be, but then we also don’t know when the first moments will be either, the ones that change our lives for the better. There are so many of these magical moments, these sparks, happening all the time, all around us that will eventually lead to something amazing, to love and happiness and laughter. The ones that make you look back and think, yes, even then I knew that this was something, that this person was someone. So, we need to take both of these things, the firsts and the lasts, and accept them as part of life because we can’t control them and I know this is hard for us to accept, but people have been creating life, and dealing with the end of it, for thousands of years and the world has carried on.
How to support a grieving person – part two
The last time I wrote about death I gave some tips on How to Deal with a Grieving Person, so here are some more:
- Don’t be scared of someone’s grief. Face it and walk into it, because you being there dilutes those emotions a little bit. Yeah, we might cry, but is that really so terrible? Admittedly, I’m not the prettiest of criers, there’s a lot of puffiness and snot so brace yourselves, it’s not like the films. Will I look like I’ve been in a fight? Absolutely yes. But will the world end? Absolutely not.
- Don’t assume we’re all millionaires now. Quite a few people expected me to give up work after my husband died, but stand down, Columbo, you’ve all watched too many films. There was no massive pay-out, no life insurance, no huge will read out in an oak-panelled room, my newly botoxed face hidden by a black veil while my handsome young chauffeur waited outside. My household income is considerably less than it was two years ago, so the cruise and the Porsche will have to wait.
- Don’t (as someone did to me, one year in) ask us if we’re feeling better now. Grief isn’t an illness with a beginning or an end; it’s a bit like being an alcoholic. It’s not something you once were, it’s something you will always be and it presents itself when your resistance is low. (My response, by the way, was ‘No, he’s still dead,’ which wasn’t my finest moment but seriously, what a stupid question. Also, for the first year at least, grief gives you a green card for being a bit of an arse, use it wisely my friend.)
- Don’t tell us what our loved one would be thinking. The most common one, in the few months after he died, was ‘he wouldn’t want you to be sad’. No, of course he wouldn’t, but he also knew me well enough to know that I would be sad – I’ll cry at an advert with a puppy in it!
- Don’t tell us we’re strong, or brave. This makes us sad. We don’t feel strong, we’re just trying our best to deal with a situation we had no choice about, we’d much rather we didn’t have to do all this, and we wish everything wasn’t such an effort.
- Check on us at weekends. At first I dreaded weekends, they were the hardest, they’re when it’s most obvious that life is not how it used to be and when you miss your person the most. See also: sunny days.
- Don’t comment on our grief. Those little comments can feel like a judgement – ‘Oh, I didn’t expect to see you out so soon…’ or ‘Wow, you’re always out, you’re so sociable.’ No two grieving people look or act the same. My grief may not look how you think it should, but it is still valid. We see grief in films and on TV – it’s always loud and shouty and visceral, but the reality isn’t always like that, the same way that not all women scream during labour like they do on TV. That doesn’t make it any less. And we only let you see what we want you to see, I’ll only arrange to see you/call you/write an upbeat article about grief, when I’m feeling positive and light; there are still plenty of times when I’m feeling sad and bitter and resentful, we just learn early on that that’s not what anyone wants to see, so we dilute it.
- Don’t tell us it’s time to move on. The minute our person died and we didn’t just collapse in a heap, was us moving on, so zip it.
- Don’t judge us for redecorating our houses. I’ve changed my house and made it mine, I put pictures up that I know he would have hated and got rid of some paintings that I’d always hated. It’s not an attempt to remove him from the house, just a need to carve out my own space.
- Accept that we can feel sad about losing the person who died, yet still have the capacity to love someone else, just as fiercely. The journey I’m on now doesn’t cancel out the journey I was on before, they’re just going in different directions. Sadness and happiness can co-exist. There is room for both.
- Don’t assume that once those ‘firsts’ are out of the way it all gets easier. You get through the firsts on a wave of adrenaline and you’re still on autopilot.
- Don’t dismiss our triggers. I personally can’t watch/listen to anything that has a defibrillator sound, or see anything with paramedics or coffins or funerals, and if you don’t reply to my message within a couple of hours, I will think you’ve died. Hopefully this will pass but in the meantime, humour me.
- Ask us about our person, say their name, they’re not bloody Voldemort.
- Be prepared for our newly honed ‘f**k it’ attitude. Any kind of uncertainty on your part, about anything at all, will probably be answered with a cheery ‘Do it, you might die tomorrow’. Which is meant with the best intention, because what’s the worst that can happen? The worst has happened and here we are still, so go for it.
Finding hope in unexpected places
So here we are, more death chat, and don’t get me wrong, I don’t just talk about death, I feel that I’m quite fun to be around, but we do need to be better at having these conversations.
I was thinking recently about the Sycamore Gap tree, and how awful and sad it was that it was destroyed. But now new shoots are appearing, and those new shoots are going to make beautiful new trees around the original tree. So the original part is still there and won’t be forgotten, but there’s new stuff too that wouldn’t be there if the horrible thing hadn’t happened. I feel that’s a real lesson in accepting the different paths our lives may suddenly take, seeing the beauty in that path and being brave enough to take that first step.
I’m going to annoy myself by finishing with a quote from Kafka who said; Everything you have will probably be lost, but in the end, love will come back in another way.
