Hi Andy,
Long read coming up…
I will try and address each of your points to give some structure to my reply.
To your first point: ‘And there are times which I can consider my self, not lucky as I would never use that term, but in a better position than others necessarily are. However on the other side of it I don’t care about any of that and what happened was, to me, the worst thing I could imagine.’
I completely hear what you are saying and I totally get this. I very often find myself back in that place. Each of us has our own world, and we and those we love are at the centre of that. Everything that happens within our world, especially at the centre of it, is of the greatest importance to us, no matter what else is going on outside of it. Our own world impacts on us directly and has the strongest of our emotions attached to it. So how could we possibly feel lucky just because someone else who we don’t know/don’t are about has it worse? And what even is ‘worse’? By the sounds of it, your heartache is pretty up there with the worst a human can feel, actually. And I have felt like that too. And we are allowed, and justified, to feel like that, no matter what else is going on in other people’s lives. Who knows, other people may read our posts, in another situation, in another country, in another culture, and be thinking, ‘They think that’s bad? They should hear my story!’ But you know what? Even if (looking at it objectively) they are right, and going through much ‘worse’, that isn’t going to diminish the emotion you are feeling about your situation. Maybe when you’re stronger, the element of looking outside of your situation and getting ‘perspective’ in terms of one sh***y situation compared to another may actually make you feel lucky for some things. But whilst it is easy for an outsider to look at 10 people and their situations and rank them in order of least sh***y to most sh***y, the way they are feeling could be ranked in a completely different order, or the person at the bottom of the scale may feel just as bad as the person at the top. I have in many moments looked at others who are feeling sad and depressed at things that I deem to be trivial, or not as bad as what I have been through in my life, or what mum had to go through, more importantly. And I have in the past become resentful, thinking, ‘How can you possibly feel like that when only {insert situation here} has happened to you?’ I almost laid claim over feeling like that, and only anyone who had been through what I had been through or worse was allowed to feel like that. In my weaker moments I can still have those thoughts – but as I get stronger, I look back on myself as being selfish, judgemental and unkind. (Although occasionally, totally justified!!) But I also think it is natural and understandable as we wrestle with acceptance of life being unfair, acceptance of the cards we have been dealt despite being good people, and acceptance of the fact that people are just people – some are compassionate, some aren’t, some appreciate their lives and any good fortune, some take it for granted, some live long lives, some don’t. And there is no correlation of luck or hard luck with how good or nice a person is, which is why the unfairness of life is even more conspicuous. One thing I hear time and time again, though, is no matter how lucky others seem, no one gets through life unscathed.
I try now to not compare myself and my situation and my utter grief over my mum and all the other stuff that has happened in my life to anyone else’s life. It does no one any good. And whilst it is essential to focus on how lucky we are for so many other things (live in a safe country, have food, water, a house, a partner, friends, a job, etc etc), doing that still doesn’t get us to go, ‘I see now! I’m so lucky that I no longer feel sad about the fact that my parents just died! Because it’s really not that bad, is it?!’ As if. Human emotion just doesn’t work like that. I often think, if only we could view the world objectively, and without emotion. Then there would be no emotional pain. We could just see a loved one die, acknowledge death is inevitable, then go back to work the next day without another thought about it. No pain, no suffering. Then I thought, is that a world we’d actually want to live in?! Where love doesn’t exist for the sake of avoiding the pain and suffering of bereavement? Sometimes I do think ‘Give me that world’, but then I think again. Instead, I try to marvel at the fact that our bodies work at all. I think it is actually amazing that more things don’t go wrong more quickly in more of us. We are miracles of matter, to be alive at all. My frame of mind is changing towards that because I am not religious, so that is the way I gain my sense of being lucky to be alive, and my mum having been lucky to be alive, in the first place.
I know I have rambled on at quite some length, but these are all the sorts of thoughts that have really kept me going over the past few months, when I crave some rational objectivity to pull myself out of a low point.
You talk about guilt. Guilt is a completely normal part of grieving. People who had been through their own bereavement said to me time and time again that I’d feel guilty when mum died, even way before mum died. ‘You’re going to feel guilty, you know – even with nothing to feel guilty for, there’s no avoiding it,’ they’d say. At the time they said it, I thought, ‘I don’t feel guilty about anything, so I don’t think I will when mum dies’. Wow, how wrong I was. Guilt weighed me down. I felt so much guilt for different reasons. None of them were justified.
I needed to find a way to put the guilt down. I only managed to put it down and start walking away from it after going to the counselling sessions. The counselling really helped me deal with the guilt – even though it took me a long time to not feel guilty for walking away from the guilt. And somehow, one day, you will find a way to put down that weight of guilt and walk away from it too. It will likely take time and work. You really do need to talk about it with someone though, not necessarily to a counsellor. It’s the only way through it.
No doubt I will return to the guilt and pick it up in future, maybe several times, maybe for long periods. But learning how to put the guilt back down, and walk away from the guilt (guilt-free), and working on recognising that there is no rational justification for the guilt you feel will help you heal.
So as a teeny tiny start, I will say to you now: you have absolutely nothing to feel guilty for. It is so easy to say when your parent dies how much of a better child you could have been, how much closer you could have been to them, how much more you could have done with them etc, etc. But there needs to be some degree of acceptance from you at some point that your relationship with your dad was your relationship with your dad. The way it was is the way it was. You loved him, he loved you, he was your dad, you were his son, and however close you were, nothing can break that. I think perhaps it is because you have your relationship with your dad in direct comparison to your relationship with your mum that you feel it wasn’t good enough. It was a different relationship. And it is ok to have had a closer relationship with your mum, you know. Nothing to feel guilty about there. That’s just the way relationships go.
Regarding your guilt towards your mum – well, I know directly how easy it is to think of all the things you could have said and done to have helped better than you think you did. But – you acted with nothing but the information you had at the time and the love you had for your mum. For that, you cannot berate yourself. There would have been no real right thing to say or do anyway. And the main thing really here is that you were with her. And that would have been a bigger comfort to her than any words you did or didn’t say.
You asked me how I feel about my situation right now. Today, I have my rational, strong head on, and I feel ok – I feel content, actually - although I still get moments most days, and I still avoid sad songs. A few days ago, I heard a song play that deeply brought me back to her – that song made me remember her so vividly, and I almost lost it again. ‘Losing it’ though just really means crying and falling temporarily back into that pit of despair. And we have to allow ourselves to do that, as that is grieving. It is essential to. Yet I think I hold back the tears too often, as sod’s law has it, I’ll be on my way to work or with friends when I think of something that reminds me of it all and the significance of it. And I only feel comfortable to cry when I’m in my home.
You asked me if I’m able to feel positively yet.
Positive is probably the wrong word at the moment. Not every cloud does have a silver lining, after all. There are no bright sides to take from this. But I do feel I’m getting stronger, so in that sense of being more positive, I would say yes.
You also talk about your fear of your own mortality – dying young because your parents and grandparents did. My fear about the exact same thing is only just starting to subside a little. I have talked to other people who have lost their parents young and they say the exact same thing – if they died young, could I too? I was a complete hypochondriac for a while. I read a lot about illness and mortality. Yes, we might die young. But statistics say we probably won’t. Have you been to your doctor to ask for a professional opinion? They will tell you if there is a genetic risk that you should be tested for, or if there is no possible connection and that your fears of getting what they had are unfounded, which they most likely are. Also, medicine is getting more advanced every year. All we can do is live a moderate, healthy lifestyle, and be aware of our bodies – the rest isn’t up to us I’m afraid. Again, when I have my rational head on, I think, I could have died years ago, of so many things. The fact I did not and that I am still here actually makes me feel pretty happy. Only approx 100 years ago, life expectancy was around 45 years old for people in the UK. I feel lucky we have even the chance of double that, and even more. I have worked on flipping the fear of ‘what if I don’t live a long life’ on its head to ‘I could have already died’. It helps me.
Regarding charity work/fundraising – you’re completely right - don’t do it until you feel stronger. You’ll be useless to any charity until you have looked after and helped yourself first. And fostering – what a fantastic and admirable thing for you to aim for in your future, for when you are strong again. I think it is wonderful you are looking at your future, and at ways that will help others so significantly. It is hard to do – you should be proud of yourself.
I strongly, strongly encourage you to talk, with actual words coming out of your mouth, above everything else. I understand the thought of it terrifies you. But I promise you – it is absolutely essential. If you feel close to/comfortable with your partner, you need to talk to her. And start as soon as you can. It doesn’t really matter what you say or how you say it, but you need to start articulating how you feel with someone you trust. From experience, and from just about every book I have read on grief, talking is the only way you will truly start to wade through it. I use those tools for distraction and suppression of emotions that you mention. But I also force myself to talk as much as I can – mainly to my husband – he’s the only one I can really just let go in front of. And you need to do that – you need to talk, and to let go. It may be hard, but it gets easier. You will start to process your feelings that way, and that is the start of managing your grief and moving forward with your life.
I have a great husband, a few family members (no one who lives close by though), and a few close friends to help me – but I do also feel that loneliness you speak of. My relationship with mum was unique and irreplaceable – she was my guide in my life, and I sometimes feel without her I have no one. So I truly understand you there. It’s rubbish isn’t it. Heartbreaking and unbearable and sh*t.
Gradually, very gradually, I am starting to get back hope for the future. I’m still walking two steps forward, one step back, but I’m increasingly able to think of mum and talk about her, every day, without being punched in the guts. I am strong enough to get on with life as best as I can without denying or suppressing (too much) all that went on and the fact mum is no longer with me. I’ve still got a long way to go, but I think I am starting to heal. Look up ‘Kintsugi’. A Japanese art form of broken pottery that is mended with gold. The cracks aren’t disguised, and the object becomes more beautiful. I love that art form, and I like the metaphor very much. So did my mum – she was the one who showed me this art form. In us, the cracks of our grief will always be there, but we will one day mend, and we will be even stronger than we were before. We may be more compassionate, appreciate life more, and be more motivated to help those in need.
We’ll get there Andy.
Louise x
(p.s. I have just read this through, out loud, before posting, and I cried. Saying the words out loud is hard, but necessary. Please start trying to do that).