Life grows around grief

Six years on

It amazes me how little preparation we have for major life experiences like birth, teenage years, partnering, parenting, ageing and death.  We often learn by direct experience through a process of trial and error, talking with others, particularly peers, and reading printed or electronic material.  This can be a very helpful but not enough when people have difficult experiences.

Our personal experiences, in health work and with ten family deaths before my partner became critically ill, did not prepare us in any way for his dying and death. While the deaths of older generations or distant relatives were sad or very sad, we always had our nuclear family to go back to and didn’t need to seek support beyond conversations with family or friends.

When K. was dying, it was totally different.  We had lived together for a lifetime and I was directly involved in his difficult day to day experiences over the last year of his life.  We could talk clinically about his physical deterioration and discuss where his ashes would be buried, but we were totally unprepared for the intense emotional impact.

K. did not receive any professional support for this even though he spent his last four months in health and care facilities. I learnt later that there is a holistic form of palliative care involving family conversations about end of life, and support for both physical and emotional issues, but this was not our experience.  Palliative care was the term used for stopping active treatment and as a euphemism for dying – “he’s palliative” was particularly irksome when we both preferred the ‘d’ words.

I was devastated after K’s death.  My early grief experience was one of isolation and stumbling around in the dark, struggling to reconcile emotional new me with stoic old me, haunted by the silence at home and missing so many tangible and intangible things related to our relationship. Grief was a major part of my life for the next five years.  I wasn’t huddled in a corner but in the early years cried constantly at home, in the car and walking along the street, then put on my stoic old me mask before walking into work.

K. was the first to die amongst friends and I felt overt and covert pressures to ‘get over it’ as some people seemingly drew on their own experiences with the death of earlier generations and expected grief to be short lived.  I can see now how our culture of death and grief avoidance is still having a strong impact even though some or many people are replacing ‘stiff upper lip’ with open conversations about difficult life experiences.

As a wise grief counsellor pointed out to me some time later, the depth of grief is related to the centrality of the person to our life.  It can be anyone, as I learnt from grieving others, but in my case it was K.  Of course it was.  Why didn’t I anticipate the bleeding obvious?!  Perhaps because I don’t generally cross bridges until I come to them, and apart from K’s ashes, we didn’t discuss after-death.  We were far too focused on dying.

In some ways, work kept me sane.  Distracted by deadlines and connecting with other people on a daily basis gave me a much needed break from grief.  It lurked at my office doorway every night, waiting to escort me home but over time I found a pathway that worked for me because each new door opened another, creating a cumulative building block effect from the lessons learnt.

It started with a list of written resources from the palliative care team who had assessed K, as it contained a good beginner’s book on grief which was a great help.  It opened my cynical mind to the idea of counselling and after a wonky start with the wrong person, I found an excellent grief counsellor.

Six months later while searching for a weekend away, I stumbled a grief program that showed me the benefit of connecting with grieving others in person.  Quite by chance, a later web search led me to grief writing program and the ongoing connection with a much larger network of grieving people around the world.  This became my ‘go to’ place for the next four years.  Somewhere to speak honestly about feelings at any time of the day or night and know there would always be a supportive response from people with similar experiences - the on line friends I would never meet in person.

My overall journey was one of going down into many deep caves while also climbing mountains of information about dying, death and grief.  Somewhere along the way I developed and passion about death and grief literacy.  It was a great relief to also find public forums about death, dying and grief that were readily available in my local area for a few years.  They included one day forums, discussion groups by some cemeteries, locally organised activities for the annual ‘Dying to Know’ day by Groundswell, and multiple books or activities by professional people or organisations.  Sadly, most of the face to face activities stopped long before COVID.

After six years, I can see that emotional new me is here to stay and can co-exist quite comfortably with stoic old me.  I weep about past memories, and every death and sad story in the media.  It feels like my life is starting to grow around my grief but the core of it will always remain, along with K, until our ashes can be buried together in a place where we won’t be disturbed.  I’m feeling quite comfortable, even curious, about my own experience with dying whatever that turns out to be.