Tag: acceptance
What is grief?
What is grief?
I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently. I spend a lot of time online which is good from the point of view of finding out information, and bad because you never know if the information is good or not! We have a local hospice which offers grieving counselling and bereavement support, the doctor made a referral for the family to them at the beginning of May, but typically for government organisations we’ve not heard anything yet!
Just so that I could connect with other people in a similar situation I’ve been browsing a few forums dedicated to grief and loss, particularly that of the loss of the spouse. They are a mixed bunch really.
One of the things that seems to be standing out is that everyone is grieving struggles with the concept of what it actually is, and what they should do.
A person posted on one of the forums yesterday that her family thought she was obsessing about her late husband, she posted a whole host of things she was doing and asked the forum if she was indeed obsessive or whether this was normal.
The question is, what is normal? And who makes up the rules?
Reading through the posts that many of these people are making I’ve come to realise that in this situation we make up our own rules, and then beat ourselves up with them… What a crazy thing to do.
Each time I catch myself using words like should, must or ought I ask myself the question “Who says?” – and most of the time it’s me, putting my own pressures on myself.
Learning to ignore myself is a strange thing to do. I’m learning to accept that however I feel at any given moment is absolutely fine, I don’t have to do anything. There are no stages of grieving! People have said that everyone goes through seven stages starting with denial then anger then some other bull shit… Who says?
In my own grief I refuse to be defined by other people’s version of normal. I refuse to define myself as a grieving person.
As ever I’m writing this post off the top of my head and things keep coming to mind, and what comes to mind now is the political correctness regarding disabilities (okay, my mind leaps around all over the place). I always used to think that the person with disabilities was ‘disabled’ – and I remember advertising campaigns saying they are not a disabled person, they are simply a person living with a disability. It always seemed like a semantic argument, but now I understand. I’m not a grieving person, I’m a person living with grief – I refuse to let it define me.
One of the other things that other people on the forums seem to struggle with his guilt. I can understand this but choose not to do it myself. Sitting here writing, if I think about it, I can find lots of things to be guilty about. Guilty that I didn’t make Claire slow down a bit. Guilty that we didn’t move to her beloved seaside a couple of years ago. Guilty that we didn’t take her to the hospital sooner. But I choose not to beat myself up over these things. What’s the point?
Guilt only serves one purpose and that is to destroy us. The reality is that Claire and I made the best decisions we could, at the time that we made them, knowing what we knew then. With the extra knowledge I have now, if I could go back in time, I would make different decisions. But when those decisions were made I didn’t have that additional knowledge, and so we made the best decisions that we could.
I’ve let those things go.
One of the things that someone said on a forum yesterday was that people die, but love doesn’t. I took comfort from those words which reminded me of what Claire and I had engraved on the inside of our wedding rings:
“Endless Love”
And it is…
Change Time
Change Time
I know from my training as a coach that we create emotional problems (phobias, fear, anger etc) when there is a massive change, or significant emotional event, in our lives that our neurology can’t cope with, our mind simply dumps everything in to an ’emotional dustbin’ and screws the lid on tight to keep us safe and to allow us to cope.
Up until now I’ve not really experienced such a significant single event, sure we’ve had some tough times (people that know us know what those are) but apart from when the twins were born and we nearly lost Toby things have been pretty stable – or at least they’ve seemed that way.
At the time things can seem up and down, like tracking the stock market up and down with one of those little charts they draw… up, down, up, down… almost a rhythm to it.
At the time it seems like it’s up and down, but when we get a SIGNIFICANT event, like the death of a spouse and we pan out from that chart and take the whole thing in context, that small area of our lives seems to be constant when we can see that huge event in the context of everything else.
Up until last night I didn’t realise how much my life has changed since 17th April 2013.
If I compare now to 16th April everything has changed – work, kids, home, relationship… everything!
That old life has gone – the routines, the way we did things, the habits, the aspirations, the plans – all changed.
Accepting that is difficult, but the reality is that there is no choice and Claire always told me “If you can’t change it, accept it and move on to something you CAN change’ – she was right… she always was!
Claire, it’s the twins birthday today and we miss you. I remember 16 years ago when we almost lost Toby and he was hooked up to a ventilator looking really ill. You did so well, you were such a great Mum and you sat by them both for weeks in special care. It’s days like today when we really notice you are absent. You are so missed, you really are. I love you so much Claire and this pain of loss is hard to take, but I know I have to get through it. Thank you for all you did sweetheart. We’ll miss you today.