Grief doesn’t ever leave, it just morphs and shifts as you change. There are no stages of grief, the model developed in the late 1960’s is both outdated and debunked. Everyone’s experience is completely their own, even two or three siblings grieving a parent, grieve differently. And that is ok.
Grief is a very real thing in our body, physiologically (see these books). It changes our brains and our bodies, not so much for the better, but so much so that we should have medical check ups as a bereaved person.
It does get easier, like people often say, the feelings of being held under in a deep ocean has eased, the jelly legs have eased, the inability to function has eased.
The loss never goes away, the wishing they were here doing all the things with you never goes away, the sudden flashes of disbelief, their voice so clearly in your head, visions of them smiling and laughing. Mum’s cackle always gets me. The things they said; one that sticks in my mind is mum saying on her last birthday, when she didn’t know it was her last, ‘I made it to 66’, and always ‘my darling girl’.
The grief is less in my body, the pain, the lump in my throat…it has eased. The gaping hole inside, it’s still there but the edges aren’t so raw.
With the pain fading it can feel like the vividness of her is fading too. Which is also heartbreaking, but I do my best to keep her sharp in my mind.
Defining myself by my grief is less intense, it used to take up all of the space of my conscious self, my day to day, my struggles, all the roads leading back to grief. The cause of my anger, grief; the cause of my depression, grief; the cause of my struggles, grief; the cause of my inability to concentrate or think, grief…. It’s all abating which feels like exhaling, like opening a window, like finding the light again..
Acceptance of death, and love and life and change and growth. And what it means to embody bereavement.
I’ve recently read a handful of books/memoirs including; Joan Didion’s ‘The year of magical thinking’ and Geraldine Brooks, ‘Memorial days’. They’re about loss and grief of loved ones and the experience that goes with it, and they have a lot in common; the disbelief, the adjustment to living without the loved one, the loss of the bereaved life and piecing it back together. I’ve found it’s helpful learning about others’ experiences. There are themes of similarity but also the differences are embedded throughout.
The journey will never end, but the realisation that grief, it is part of life, part of loving and part of our existence on this planet, is a great one to have.
So I’ll be over here lighting two red candles, and letting them burn down until they go out, listening to Irish tunes, drinking copious amounts of tea and crying my eyes out, like I do every year on the 14th of December. Waiting for the clock to strike 4.50pm, the moment she took her last breath.
It’s become a ritual, and I think it’s important to spend a whole day leaning into the grief, expressing it however it wants to come, feeling it all to the very core of my being. Listening to this soundtrack as it was playing during the days mum was passing…it takes me right back to her living room, to her, to the moments, her last moments which is devastating, but also cathartic and liberating in a way.
My daughter knows this ritual too as I’ve been doing it every year since she was born. She helps pick some flowers for the table, we get all the pictures of mum, ‘Metty’ and arrange them with some of her special things. My daughter looks at the pictures of mum and says ‘I miss Metty, I wish she was here with us’, and I say she is here, we just can’t see her and she agrees.
Alli x
