Month: July 2013
An Empty Wardrobe
An Empty Wardrobe
This weekend has been the toughest by far for two reasons, firstly we sorted through Claire’s clothes on Saturday and yesterday I sorted through the loft and found a load of diaries.
Sorting through the clothes wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be whilst we were doing it, but it all hit me afterwards when everything was quiet and I was sat in my room with an empty wardrobe. That wardrobe feels like a metaphor for my life at the moment. There was a compartment in my life that was filled so completely, wholey and perfectly by Claire and just as that wardrobe is now empty, bare and actually completely pointless unless it is filled so it is with that compartment in my life – bare, empty and pointless.
We also found some diaries that Claire wrote for the kids. I was amazed to discover that she wrote a pregnancy diary for all four children charting how she felt every single day of the pregnancy. She then also kept a new baby diary, again charting how she felt every single day for the first few months of each of our children’s lives.
I didn’t know she did that.
I just want to hug her and thank her. She has left us a memory of how she felt, a memory that would otherwise have died on the 17th April when she did.
I miss her too much and can’t write any more today.
Good bye old, hello new
Good bye old, hello new
So many people are sending the messages and e-mails in response to my blog posts, thank you, please keep them coming you are not bothering me, you are not annoying and it genuinely helps.
Each time someone responds I have a new realisation, and here is one of those.
Here is a snippet of what was sent to me yesterday:
I realised that the loss of <<name removed>> had changed me forever, and importantly I realised that this was OK.
I know that I have changed, and with my training as a coach I recognise that my beliefs, values and decisions have all been jumbled up, reordered and have yet to settle.
I also realise that it is okay to change. It’s acceptable for me to reorder my beliefs, values and decisions to become a new person.
The battle I’m having at the moment is that I don’t want to! I put a lot of effort into my life up until 17 April 2013, a considerable amount of hard work went into my business, my personal life and especially my relationship. That hard work grounded my values and beliefs and ensured that they were all aligned to achieve the same goal. I was happy with that, it felt right and everything with the world was good.
All that has changed now, my beliefs and values have changed immeasurably and it’s so hard to let go of the way things were because of the hard work that I put into all that. And the truth is I don’t really want to let go but similarly I guess I need to as a key component of all of that i.e. Claire is now missing.
If you are happy in your relationship with your partner imagine being told that you have to abandon all of that, completely walk away and change everything. You would be pretty loathed to do so wouldn’t you, and understandably so. Yet that is how I feel. On the one hand Claire is here with us, and if she is then I want to keep hold of that. On the other hand Claire has gone, and I need to let go.
You see my problem?
I need to make a decision to let go of the old me and welcome the new me, soon.
A weird thing keeps happening…
A weird thing keeps happening…
When I started writing this site about my journey of coping with grief my intention was to use it like a permanent diary so that I could chart my progress over the years to come. This post is one of those.
I keep experiencing this weird existential feeling, a live ‘as it happens’ dissociated viewpoint where I am aware of what I am doing and can see everything through my own eyes yet I have a concurrent sense of viewing myself externally.
It’s kind of like being aware of two peoples viewpoints of the same situation at the same time.
I quite often experience this when I am presenting or running a course. I can be in mid-flow, delivering some excellent content (at least that’s what I believe!) with passion and enthusiasm and yet at the same time I can see myself doing it and my brain is in a different place thinking about what I’m going to say next.
From what I remember I’ve spoken to other people that do public speaking and they say they have had similar experiences whilst delivering a presentation or course, so I guess that is not so uncommon.
I’ve never experienced this in any other situation though, but recently it’s happened a few times whilst I have been going about my everyday business. It normally happens when the house is quiet, perhaps first thing in the morning or last thing at night. I become aware of myself making breakfast and at the same time can see myself making breakfast wondering where Claire is and is this all genuinely real?
To make sense of it going to take a stab at understanding why it’s happening…
…OK, so it’s now 20 min later, I wrote a few paragraphs about why I think is happening and gave up. They were gibberish.
I think what I can learn from writing this post is that experiences perhaps don’t always have a reason – they just happen. I think we can sometimes over analyse why we do things or what is happening in a desperate human attempt to create order out of chaos. And now strangely I’m reminded of when I studied chaos theory in my MBA, isn’t it odd how things come to mind and can be triggered by one word.
What I clearly remember from looking at Chaos Theory is that it can look very much like chaos and yet at the same time be self ordering and self-sustaining. I’m reminded of an example that was given to us of an empty beach. If we allowed people slowly onto the beach, one by one, it would be completely chaotic as to where people sat. And yet people would end up all sitting an equal distance from one another. The chaotic system of arranging where we sit on the beach is in actual fact self ordering.
So my lesson today is to let the chaos happen, know that the chaos is actually self ordering and relax without any explanation of why it happens… It just does!
Removing a critical component
Removing a critical component
My middle daughter (16 years old) wanted to go to the shops on Saturday and asked if I would go with her, oh joy I thought!
We wandered around for a bit going in and out of various shops whilst she looked for the sunglasses she wanted and I really noticed how sorely lacking in certain skills I am. The whole ‘shopping’ thing is totally beyond me, I do man shopping and it takes me a few minutes to get what I want and then I’m in the car and going home again.
It just highlights the things that Claire used to do which we all took for granted. Don’t get me wrong, Claire hated shopping too and we often joked that she could be an honorary man when it came to her style of shopping, but at least when the girls wanted someone to accompany them, she knew how to play the good mother and join in the ‘fun’.
It’s also been a few family members birthday this week, and I missed it. Once again, I’m a typical man.
If things were the other way round and it was me that had died then Claire would be writing the same things I’m sure, from a different perspective. I suppose it’s to be expected that as we get back to normal, what ever normal is, we begin to notice the old ‘normal’ things that are difficult or impossible to do now.
I’m quite resourceful person so can usually cope in most situations, but it’s so difficult when I spent 22 years not exercising a whole load of resources. It sounds sexist but there are whole load of ‘motherly/womanly’ resources which Clare had in abundance and so it was easier to let her look after those side of things in life. And now I can almost see the gaping hole where those resources should be, but I don’t even know what they are let alone how to begin using them.
Sending birthday cards, booking holidays or going to the shops with the girls sound like easy things to do, but I’m struggling to know where to start.
Making the printer work, packing the car to go on holiday and finding the best deal to shop online is what I know how to do and to me those things seem easy, but ask me to get organised enough to buy a birthday card a week in advance, write it and get it to the post box and I’ll struggle. I just haven’t used ‘that resource’ (what ever that resource is) for 20 odd years.
I guess that’s one of the problems of working Together in a marriage, like a well oiled And highly efficient machine, as soon as one of the critical components is removed the whole machine falls apart – Our marriage worked so well because we worked so well together, and it seems ironic that it is that very fact that makes things so tough now.
I know that as time goes on I will recognise what resources are lacking and begin to find out how to use them but in the meantime if I miss your birthday please accept my apologies.
My beautiful daughter’s prom
My beautiful daughter’s prom
Last night was my beautiful daughter’s prom. It was tough.
The kids all met at a friends house for a pre-prom party, so many Mums were there having their photographs taken with their kids, a tough day.
It wasn’t easy for me to get there yesterday and I now know the full horror of what being a single parent is actually like. I’m trying to work a full day, look after the house, keep everything running and be there for the kids at the times when they need me. Thea told me that I didn’t need to worry about going to the pre-prom party and I almost didn’t go, but I moved some things around working a little later in the evening and I’m really glad I did.
The temptation to say ” Claire would have loved this” or ” it’s so sad that Claire isn’t around to see this” is mightily strong, but doesn’t get us anywhere. I could go on and on, all day every day thinking the same thing. Every new experience is something that Claire is missing out on. She won’t get to see her kids grow up, get married or have more children of their own. She won’t get to live by the sea or enjoy all of that time we had planned travelling around in a motorhome visiting the coast of the UK.
I’m not sad for myself, I’m sad for her.
The love that she had for us endures yet so does the pain of her not sharing these experiences with us.
This has been the hardest post to write for some time, I guess it’s because yesterday was such a ‘real’ experience made more noticeable by the presence of all the other Mums.
I’m not sure yet of the best way to cope with this kind of loss. The loss of those shared experiences, those experiences that we would have enjoyed together that now have been tainted with loss. I suppose one of the ways of coping is to just avoid those experiences, to never have fun again! I can certainly see why that would be appealing for some people, if we have lost someone dear to us and we just curl up into a ball then we won’t have any positive experiences which make the pain of loss feel greater.
Every time there is a positive experience we are reminded that we are not sharing it with the one we love. And that hurts.
But I’m not going to do that, I’m going to put myself in a position where I can have those positive experiences and when I’m reminded that I’m not sharing them with Claire I will experience the loss, the sadness and the hurt that she is not there with me – I will acknowledge those feelings, I will learn something from those feelings, I will apply what I learn to myself so that next time I experience it I can grow – and then I will move on.
And for me, that’s the way it has to be…
A New Chapter By The Sea
A New Chapter By The Sea
We went down to our new house over the weekend to have a chat with the guy selling it. Nothing is definite yet as we haven’t exchanged contracts, but as far as we are able to tell everything is good and we should be moving there late August or early September.
The house is in a small village in West Dorset and is about 0.8 of a mile from the beach. Claire informed me that we had been to the beach a few years ago, but I must say that with my man memory I have no recollection, and so I decided that we’d walk to the beach on Saturday to see how far it was from our new house to be.
We set off walking from a house and just 20 minutes later Thea, Millie, Toby, Olivia, Tommy (O’s boyfriend), Evie and myself were on the beach.
I was overwhelmed with emotion, both good and bad at the same time. It felt great knowing that we would probably be living a short distance from such a fantastic beach which we can visit at any time but at the same time it was so sad knowing that this was Claire’s dream, and she came so close to realising it herself.
Claire desperately wanted to live by the sea and we often spoke about when we eventually would. She saw our new house about a week before she died, so at least she died knowing that she would be moving to the coast fairly soon. It just makes me sad to think that she never actually made it.
Losing Claire has changed me so much. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly and the only way I can describe it is as a “bollocks, I’m doing it” attitude! Facing mortality and death like this is bound to change our beliefs and values in our own life – and I think this is where the problem lay for people that don’t deal with their grief. The shift in our thinking changes so much that it becomes difficult to cope with.
Facing these issues head-on has become really important to me, I know that it would be easy to store up many negative emotions because it’s so difficult to deal with all of this change in thinking which has happened so fast. All that I know is that this is a process which happens slowly over time, each day we deal with a different issue and we move on. How long the process will take I have no idea and in fact I’m not going to focus on that at all. The problem is that we have no way of knowing that the process is finished and so why even bother asking ourselves the question, ‘is it finished yet?’.
If I’m working with a client as a coach that wants to be more confident or happy I will always ask them ” How you know that you are as confident or happy as you want to be, what will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – using this same logic on my own grief leads me to ask the question “How will you know that the grieving process has finished? What will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – unless I can answer that question with absolute clarity there is no point in me wondering how long will this will take because without clarity around that question I could end up feeling low for ever.
Moving house won’t sort all of this out I know that. But we started the process together as a couple, we were about to begin a new chapter in our lives and I’m looking forward to beginning a new chapter albeit in a rather different way to how I originally expected.
The Paradox of Despair
The Paradox of Despair
I’m currently reading an excellent book called “Seven Choices – finding daylight after loss shatters your world” by Dr Elizabeth Harper Neeld. It’s the account of Dr Neeld as she works through the emotions she feels after the loss of her husband to a very sudden death. Her story resonates deeply with my own situation.
Some of the things she writes are especially challenging and I’d like to share one of those challenging thoughts here.
Something which she has picked up on, which I strongly recognise, is the double loss of losing someone so close, not only have we lost the person as an individual but we have also lost our “Assumed Future”. We all have an assumption about how our future will pan out, even if it is not explicitly written in a life goal (as mine was) we will have a general feeling or an idea about where life is taking us.
Visits to the park, Christmas’ shared, birthdays celebrated together and even things further off – we imagine growing old, how life will be once our own children have grown up and the time we can share with each other in the future.
I’m not just talking about myself here, I’m talking about Claire’s sister, brother, mum, dad and my own kids. We all had an assumption about how life could possibly be in the future and we now have to face the loss of that as well as the loss of Claire herself. In fact anyone that knew Claire would also have had these assumptions about the future and how they would share their lives together in years to come.
This deep loss leads us to a place of despair. Despair is a word, indeed an emotion which I have never considered before. Of course I knew what the word meant academically, but now I know what it means to experience it myself.
As Dr Neeld points out, and this takes some deep thought, the fact that we are experiencing this despair means that our assumptions have been destroyed, and when assumptions are destroyed it opens up enormous possibilities. Wow, what a paradox!
When I did my creativity module of my MBA we spent many months looking at how assumptions by people in business stifle creativity and how breaking down those assumptions about their ‘given future’ in their career would massively help the business and greatly improve creativity. Without assumptions all we are left with is possibilities.
And there is the irony!
The truth is that if we feel that despair then we also have a world of possibilities. The challenge now is to allow those possibilities to happen at the same time as giving despair the respect it deserves.
Claire. My head knows that this is the truth and this is the kind of discussion I truly miss. Ironically, we could have spent a couple of hours discussing this and I know in my heart that you would have come to the same conclusion. You would have recognised the paradox of despair and possibility, indeed with your counselling training you may already have done so. I’m not going to lie, my heart feels differently. All I can feel at the moment is despair, I know the possibilites are out there and I guess that the first stage is recognising that – accepting and looking for those possibilities is something I can work towards. Goodnight sweetheart, I love you.