The Evolution of Grief; Four Years On

For the first few months without Mum, I saw grief as an annoying younger sibling that wouldn’t leave me alone (and from which I got very good at dodging). It pestered me for attention. Like the nonchalant nods and ‘ahhhs’ adults might give kids to feign interest in what they are doing, I would occasionally acknowledge ‘it’ when I spoke to other people. I’d half-heartedly mention I would ‘give myself some time’ (whatever that meant) and smiled when people said I should let myself be sad. I didn’t want to tell them I wasn’t that sad at all because then they might think I didn’t love my mum as much as I did. In fact, maybe they would think something was wrong with me and my ability to grieve. I marvelled at my coping skills, wondering if anyone else could see it too. People told me I was ‘doing so well’, but I didn’t know what they meant. Did they mean that because I wasn’t crying, I was doing well? Or it was because I was still smiling and acting ‘normal’? But then if I did cry loads and acted ‘abnormally’ would that have been a bad thing? I felt like I had something to prove but I wasn’t sure exactly what.

MAY 2016

At this point, grief was something to be done with. All I needed to do was give it a bit of my time, and then I would have done my duty. Like a Rumpelstiltskin spin off, I saw an intense cry each week as my payment to the creature that was grief. Check box ticked. 

Crying, being sad and thinking of mum was grieving. Going about normal life was not. I either did one or the other. I didn’t know how to merge the two. A bit like Jekyll and Hyde, I had my pre-mum dying self which I went to lengths to uphold, and this incredibly emotional, low and conflicted self with lots of restless energy.  The latter often came out in those mundane ‘to’ and ‘from’ moments in life when you are moving from a to b. Like trudging home from the shops carrying lots of heavy bags or walking back to the flat after a long day at uni, wondering what I’ll cook for dinner. In those moments the sadness would creep in, and lick at my ankles as I walked. I envisioned grief as the enemy whose aim was to bring me down to the pits of sadness. It was a battle of good versus bad and I would win by trampling on it and resisting it with all my might. How dare it try and underscore my day to day with sadness. How unfair to not only lose mum but to have to be completely sad about it as well. 

ruNNING IN FRANCE - AUGUST 2016

I ran nearly every day to bridge the two selves together. I’d start the run as my ‘pre-mum dying self’ and end in tears as the grief stricken ‘post-mum dying’ one. The jagged breaths and heaving chest tricked my body into crying and I would succumb to the feeling of being completely overtaken by sadness. But aside from these outbursts of intense emotion, I resisted all other manifestations of grief. I didn’t want to feel low. I didn’t want to understand the enormity of what had happened. I didn’t want to have to miss mum. In fact, I just didn’t want to have to live without her. Rather than try and confront the feelings and make space for them, I clung to my old self and my old reality. I bargained that my big cry after a run was me grieving and I could try and just get on with life in the interim.  Any change in myself, my emotions and my routines took me further away from Mum, and who I was when she was alive. They were an implicit acknowledgement of her absence and this life I didn’t choose. They were a collusion with the creature that was grief, and therefore, I had no choice but to resist it.  

Except, the more I completely ignored the sad feelings, the more uncomfortable and unsettled I felt. Like after a long day at the beach, I wanted to wash myself clean. Each ignored and resisted emotion stuck to me like gritty sand between my toes and I craved the feeling you get when you dump all your beach bags at home after a long day in the sun and then strip off and shower. I wanted to do that with grief. I wanted to find the grief equivalent of washing the salt, sand and sun cream off my skin, putting on fresh clothes and feeling clean again.   

I’m not sure when the transition came but soon my narrative of grief evolved from being seen as a thing to resist-up-until-the-point-of-a-dramatic-cry, to something to confront. My story of good versus grief wasn’t really making me feel much better. In fact, I felt completely exhausted trying to keep the sad feelings at bay until a point was reached where a dramatic cry would follow. I needed to find a way to eke out the feeling and make space for it. While I still saw grief as completely unwelcome, I realised I at least needed to try and confront the feelings head on. 

RIVER SWIM - AUGUST 2016

Part of this lessening of resistance to the sadness was because I didn’t have the energy to keep up trying to be ok. It was completely exhausting. Another reason was the decision to start therapy, and suddenly having this space to venture into the depths of emotions I had been avoiding for so long. During therapy, I was forced to puncture my week with sad emotions even if they weren’t ready to spill yet. I learnt to yo-yo down to them and back again. The more I did this, the more practiced I became in getting to the depths of sadness without fearing I wouldn’t come back. 

I look back on how my understanding of grief has changed over these past four years, and a great deal of this changing narrative was a means to control the uncontrollable. A way of figuring out how to miss Mum but which made sense to me. I can’t get rid of the absence, but I can be aware of how it makes me feel. I can try and decipher the twinges and aches and those tell-tale signs of grief creeping back in. And when these feelings creep in (manifesting as a restless energy, a deep exhaustion or a fixation on something small) it is my cue for quiet time. I need early nights, long mornings in bed with tea and my book, and few plans in my day. 

A holiday adventure for mum - JULY 2019

But then it tugs at me and this huge feeling I’ve spent so long trying to understand, and somewhat prepare for, is back. And I didn’t expect it. I am immersed in it again. And even though I know I will be ok afterwards, and I know what it is and why it’s important to feel it, it is still nauseatingly painful. I am bluntly reminded that I can’t ever hope to completely control the power and pervasive influence that loss can have. It will forever be a powerful disruptor that will warp my perception of everything and sometimes drive me crazy in a way I can’t ever fully understand or even articulate. Grief has evolved from something to resist and fear, to now something to experience and understand (but not ever completely). 

* 

So often we want something to ‘fix’ our problem. We want a solution and an ‘I’m going to feel better when’ point. However, there is no ‘solution’ to losing someone you love…and I think this was the hardest thing to accept when Mum died. I couldn’t understand how I would ever feel better – fully better – if Mum could never come back to life.   

These past four years, I have had to break down the when-am-I-going-to-feel-better feeling into a when-I-am-going-to-feel-better-than-I-feel-now feeling. I have had to accept that there is no magical state to reach in which a loss is completely fine. It’s an up and down journey, and forever will be. 

BEAUTIFUL MUM

While there are a lot of things I am uncertain of – like how grief will continue to manifest throughout my life – there are quite a few things I can be certain about. I am sure in the knowledge that after I have a huge, body shaking cry, afterwards I will feel better. I know that a string of low days will at some point end. I know that early nights make me feel better able to withstand the trickles of everyday grief. I also know that fancy olives and oat milk hot chocolates bring me joy, and that warm croissants with Marmite and butter remind me of Mum. I know that breaking down the day into moments like this – with a beginning middle and end – makes the unimaginable reality of my life without Mum more manageable. I have little ‘solutions’ to feel better in my every day, rather than waiting on my big (and unattainable) solution of seeing Mum again.  

*

“You don’t forget the person who’s gone; you can never do that, and you should not worry that you’re going to. But you fold them, and their loss, into the new person you become; and maybe that, in the end, is the greatest tribute any of us can make to anyone who has died.”

— Julia Samuel (Grief Works)