When it comes to grief there are no set rules, and be careful when anyone tries to convince you that there are. I would suggest taking a step back from such people and surrounding yourself with those who have real experience or wisdom from which to draw. In saying this, there are some cliches, that when I found myself, bereaved and injured in a terrible accident in my twenties, that I found held true.
“I’m just taking it one day at a time,” said my father. Do you notice how he said it? He framed it for himself, and if I wanted to heed him, I could, but he wasn’t dictating that I should. I loved this lack of didacticism, which I found surprising for a man who had been a teacher all his working life. It was the only means by which we could function, in the first few months anyway, just taking every day and wading through, accepting that looking too far ahead was an impossibility. In the maelstrom of emotions after losing someone, it is too hard to look into the future—vast in its emptiness without them in it. There is a quiet peace in letting the hours unfold and allowing yourself to breath and live moment to moment.
”Time heals.” One could be forgiven for replying, what banal, cliched hogwash. However, if it doesn’t ever completely heal, it recedes. That feeling of being hollowed out by grief; the pounding in the chest, and the weeping until your face is swollen and disfigured—that does stop. It has to. How could we humans had survived until the 21st century without having the most remarkable resilience? The pain will still be there, and at times it will rise in your throat and assail you, often, and inconveniently, when you least expect it. But the sharp jagged edge of it, that will fade.
“You’ll get over it.” No actually, you probably won’t. You will just learn to live with it and shape your life around the hole that is left, the way your trusty old boots mold their way around the curve of your feet. Grief alters you at a cellular level, and actually, some of the best people I know are those who have experienced acute loss throughout their lives. They are people for whom I have the greatest respect because they have a rare insight and an ability to empathize. Maybe you will live a better, different life than the one before, because you know what loss is, and how to best optimize the time you have left.
There may be no “right” way to grieve, but some ways are better than others. Pain is exhausting, and throwing one’s bruised and broken self into an excessive workload to serve as a distraction, is not the way. The pain can, and will find you, and it is better that when it does, you are not depleted and drained with few reserves left for the onslaught. My friend’s father died shortly after her wedding. He had been ill for many years, and had clung on to life long enough to see the last of his daughters marry. Days after the ceremony he died. No amount of preparation readied my friend for the pain she felt. A while later, her husband knew she needed a break, and booked a flight to Krakow in Poland. It was winter, and the streets were snow laden and glowed with lanterns. They sat in coffee shops and fire-lit taverns, and one evening looked on as a candle-lit procession filed past the window. On and on it went, light after flickering light. “This is Zaduszki,” explained the waiter in the café, the night where Polish people honor their dead. My friend sensed immediately that she was meant to be here, on this particular break, when she could have picked any European city on one of the many EasyJet flights from Dublin. Her body had told her she needed to rest and she had heeded it, and now, sharing in this beautiful tradition, she found her own way to grieve. Even amid these crowds of strangers, she was far from alone as they remembered their loved ones together.
When I lost my boyfriend, I felt guilty about everything. When I felt flashes of joy return; when I laughed; when the moments in between moments of pain stretched and became longer, I felt I wasn’t acting appropriately. Grieving in the 21st century is hard. We don’t wear black armbands—there are no outward indications of the pain within. Recently I came across the work of Professor George A Bonanno, author of The Other Side of Sadness. How I wished I had discovered him earlier. His research had shown that it is normal to show genuine joy and laugher a relatively short time after a bereavement. We, as humans, have an inborn mechanism to cope with loss. He found it “sad that we should feel guilty for these feelings,” as it is proven time and time again in his case studies, that oscillation between extreme emotion is common. I so badly needed to know this, and not only that, I needed others to know it too. I didn’t need to be judged for feeling happy at times, for appearing as though I was “moving on.” I lost my boyfriend, and for a while I felt others were of the opinion I should have been thrown on the funeral pyre with him. My rawness and sensitivity to what others thought, or what I perceived them to have thought, was something which caused me infinite distress.
In a time when so many have lost loved ones, reading and learning about grief is more essential than ever. The one thing that has been most important to me throughout my experiences, has been allowing myself to talk about my partner, and not to have him airbrushed out of my history. By filing him away under “deep, difficult material to talk about,” I stoked a sad and angry, fearful place within. Allow people to share their stories. Talk about the deceased. Don’t let their light die out.
Helen McClements is a mother, writer, and teacher from Belfast. She can often be heard on BBC Radio where she shares her musings on “Thought for the Day.” In contrast to this, she writes a blog called www.Sourweeblog.com, where she unleashes her frustrations at juggling parenthood with work and the vagaries of life.
