Grief and time


When her dad died more than a decade ago my eldest daughter, Tracey,  talked about how our lives had been travelling a certain path up to that point and when he died the path came to an end abruptly and we fell off. Her description feels so right. We found a different path eventually but it wasn't the same, it wasn't as bright, we weren't sure of the way and we knew we could never walk our old familiar path again.  Then Joe died and we had to do it all over again and then a month later Mally died and so it went on. Each time we found a different path, each time the path branching off and changing.

In the last few weeks we've had another bereavement and there's's been a lot of sadness.  Inevitably too it makes us think about the other people we have lost and the impact of that.  It's made me think about grief and the nature of it and how we survive it and Tracey's analogy came back to me.

My cousin lost her beloved eldest son last April and just recently she was told that she should be expecting to feel a bit better by now. I don't think that person told her that to be cruel. Sometimes it's hard to put yourself in another's shoes. I said in another blog that one of the reasons people can be a little insensitive is because of their expectations of grief. In the beginning people are sad for you and expect you to be sad too. They understand when you are tearful and when you don't want to socialise, when you can't summon any enthusiasm for anything and when you want to talk about the person who has died.  Quite rightly, though, after a while they get on with their lives. In doing so, however, they forget we cannot get on with ours in the same way.  To continue the earlier analogy, their path hasn't deviated so everything is still familiar. They don't have daily reminders of a life once lived that can never be the same again, so their expectations change. For us of course it's not so easy, as we have to find a different way of living. Part of that is negotiating our own feelings and expectations of grief and those of others. I often think that would be helped if we still did what the Victorians did with their more structured periods of mourning

I talked before about the mourning period that was common in the Victorian era. Widows from all social classes were expected to maintain mourning for a full year, and withdraw as much as possible from life.  As time went by, the stages of mourning gradually released their hold and black material was put aside for pale and soft shades. After approximately two years, wearing colour was no longer frowned upon. Widows would usually wear mourning the longest but how long the mourning lasted depended on your relationship to the deceased. It's curious to me that the length of period of mourning for a child was half that of a spouse. Nevertheless, the point was that wearing mourning clothes was an outward expression of the intense inner distress. It was a way of demonstrating publicly that the person was bereaved.  I think that for people to understand we sometimes need that.  
Anna calls grief a constant unwanted companion and she's right, it's always there. Grief stays with you always but not always demonstrably so, and I think it's that lack of the outward expression of grief that confuses people.

When Jo died after those weeks in hospital and Mally a month later, a few of our friends said they didn't know how we were coping - and at the time we couldn't answer that, because we didn't know either; apart from to say that we didn't really know what coping meant. I think now that what people mean when they talk about coping or 'getting through it', is that we are eating, sleeping, getting dressed, i.e. functioning as what they see as normal. People's sense of how we are coping is talked about in terms of movement. You've got through the day and they tell you it's marvellous that you're keeping going. We talk about 'getting through it' or getting 'over it' as if it's some kind of hurdle or a task that can be completed and once we have done that, things go back to the way they were. For me, that's not how grief works.

This language of movement only ever has one direction. It's always about going forward. And I think that's another misapprehension about grief. When you lose a child, and indeed anyone that you love dearly, life seems to stop. Time plays very odd tricks with you. It feels as if you're held in some kind of suspended animation. Life is going on around you but you're not really aware of it. Paradoxically, numbness is the only thing you feel. The idea that you are somehow, even in very small ways, moving forward, is wrong. It's too active, certainly in those first few weeks and months. You stay in that moment, in that time, with the person you have lost. But of course time does move on and you find yourself in the odd position of looking back, having not moved forward, and realising that a day has passed, then a week, a month and so on. And in that time you have functioned. You have spoken to people, eaten, and slept. What people see on the outside is that you are living your life - seemingly much as you did before. Though they probably know differently intellectually, there are few outward reminders.

As a society we learn about social behaviour from others, from what we observe and what our parent and peers tell us. Certainly in Western society, outward expressions of grief after the funeral are rare and I would go as far as to say frowned upon. People get embarrassed if you cry and they feel awkward. They apologise for 'upsetting you'.  We take on that awkwardness and out of politeness we try not to cry in front of others. We take off the black after the service is over and don't put it back on. And so it continues. We learn that in the early stages after a death people cry and are distressed but after that we expect that they start to get better and move on because that's what our experience is. In the absence of any outward expression of mourning, people's expectations are that people are getting over their loss. When in fact in my experience what we are doing is adapting and this isn't a linear process.

Because time does move inexorably on and we have carried on functioning within it, we have somehow simply by default started learning to live without that person. Our new way of living starts to become the norm. And in that way time becomes something of a friend. But, conversely this can add to the sheer horror of your loss. The numbness that protected in the beginning is starting to wear off and the sense of grief can take your breath away. When we talked about this recently, Tracey reminded me of an old adage that perfectly sums up this complicated relationship with time. You are never closer to the person you've lost than the day they died. And what that means is that each day that passes takes you further away from the last time you were with them; the last time you could talk to them or hug them or simply be with them and share experiences. So in that sense, time becomes an enemy. There is something so gut-wrenchingly sad about going into a new month, a new season, a new year without them that you also feel heartbroken.   You don't want to feel this awful loss and heartbreaking grief but you also don't want to not feel it. It feels oddly like a betrayal when we smile at something or find ourselves not thinking about that person constantly. You want to stay with the person you have lost so you damn time for moving on without them. It takes me back to the earlier analogy of never being able to tread that familiar path again. It's a path you so long to find despite knowing you never can.


I never use a vocabulary that suggests that once a certain amount of time has passed you move on, or get over it and that life will somehow go back to what it was, because it doesn't. When that person told my cousin they would have expected her to be feeling a bit better by now she was expressing a society norm as she saw it. That is her experience. Whilst we often pay lip service to the idea that everyone grieves differently, we still create parameters within which we expect people to fit.  And those parameters include feeling better and going back to normal within a fixed time. In my experience, you do not feel better - you feel differently. Nothing is ever the same again. The raw almost unbearable pain recedes only to be replaced with the profound sadness of knowing that you have to live the rest of your life without that person. You have to live knowing it's not the same life and not the same path, and grief, that unwelcome companion, stays with you forever.

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