Bairbre CahillGrief is a personal journey, shaped by our life and relationships, but we all have to learn to live with the new reality, writes Bairbre Cahill
I remember in the darkness my dad coming into my bedroom, sitting on the bed and with grief shredding his voice telling me that my mother had died. I remember standing in the dining room surrounded by a circle of legs, aunts, uncles and cousins gathered round me. I remember the cold, sick, shaking feeling. I was five years old.
Sometimes our bodies are better at expressing grief than our words. Our bones ache, our stomachs are sick, our minds are in a fog, our hands tremble. There are times when we have lived through a death that we want to escape from our own bodies because they remind us too deeply, too constantly of the pain we are feeling. At other times grief is a numbness, a nothingness. People describe a flatness where they do not feel anything. It is a bit like swimming underwater, where everything seems to be at a distance and everything we hear and see seems to come from far away.
This is often the reality of grief – that there is no one way to experience it. I have found that grief can be complicated and confusing. I can speak from my own experience of losing my mum and my brother, but I do not know what it is like to lose an infant to stillbirth or a partner to suicide or a child to a traffic accident. We may have similar experiences but they are not the same. Your loss and your grief are shaped by your life and relationships.
I am wary of relying too much on the idea that there are stages of grieving that we will pass through before reaching the point of acceptance. Our lives, our love and our loss may be more complicated than that. The people I have talked to have often found that their days have shards of anger and hope, denial and acceptance, depression and laughter, all mixed through with one stronger one moment, and a different one emerging an hour later.
Grief is a very personal journey. You may well have found that the people around you grieve in different ways and you may find that distressing, confusing or even a source of conflict. Some people talk about wanting to withdraw. They do not want anyone else to see their pain. They feel vulnerable and almost naked before other people. Others need to express their grief – totalk, to cry and to have other people acknowledge the depth of their pain.
Depending on how we grieve we may look at others and find ourselves judging them. Our own grief and rawness can make us harsh and we can be tempted to view other people as disconnected, attention-seeking or callous.
Judging others
The reality is that people are simply trying to cope in their own way. So in the midst of all of this the challenge is to be compassionate with ourselves and each other, to try to understand how grief is being lived through by those around us. Are we able to refrain from judging others for not grieving our way? Can we try to keep loving each other and communicating, to be there for each other even in silence?
A question often asked in the months following a death is “How is he/she coping? Is she/he getting over it?” That idea of ‘getting over it’ has always struck me as strange. I could get over a broken arm – after a period of time my arm would heal. That is not the case when someone we love dies. A more appropriate question may be, “Are you learning to live again?”
We cannot return to a time before we experienced loss. We cannot undo the way our lives have been torn apart. Yet the reality is that in the weeks, months and years following a death we do begin to function again. We may have a sense of frustration, anger and even guilt that life goes on, that the dog still needs to be walked and the dinner still needs to be made and eaten.
So what we discover is what we might call ‘a new sort of normal’. This new normal doesn’t try to pretend that everything is okay.
In this new normal I come to accept that I have been changed by the experience of death and grief. In my own case as well as being a mother and a wife, a friend and a sister, daughter and aunt, I am and always will be someone who has lost her mother and her brother. Part of grieving is learning to live that new reality.
You may find that you are resistant to any sense of normality – new or otherwise. It may feel that if you accept this new normal you are denying the grief and loss you feel. The reality is that all of these emotions and experiences flow together. We may begin to establish routines again and yet find ourselves hijacked by a memory, a song, a word.
So if we talk about acceptance it is not in the sense of saying, “It’s ok that this happened to us”. It is more about saying, “Something terrible has happened and our lives are changed forever and yet we realise that this is the reality we have to live with.”
The question of where God is in the midst of it all may add to the challenges we face.
I have also found that grief doesn’t move in straight lines. Time passes after the death of a loved one. We deal with so many challenges. We begin to see that new normal emerge. Friends and family look at us and may say, “Yes, she is coping fairly well” – and then something knocks us completely off balance and we are back dealing with our grief in a way that is raw and new.
I was five when my mother died. When our eldest daughter approached her fifth birthday I began to feel an overwhelming stress. It is not that I thought I was going to die. I simply felt that I didn’t know how to be a mother to my own daughter beyond the age of five. I felt – bizarrely, I know – that I didn’t have the script.
The stress didn’t lift until after the birthday had passed and I found our lives continuing with all their usual bumps and blessings. Those months brought home to me in a new way the sense of what I had lost when my mother died. I was shocked to find myself grieving all over again.
It is something that has happened in different ways at different stages drawing me back into what it meant to lose my mum and brother.
Grief often follows this spiral path, bringing us back to a place we have been before but at a different level. It is as if there are knots that still need untangling and the only way is to go back and spend the time. Walking the spiral is painful and yet it can be a life-giving thing. It is not a question of seeking pain for its own sake but of having the courage to own the depth of our love and the depth of our loss.
It is about confronting the experience of death and not allowing it to control and limit our lives. When we walk the spiral we are searching for peace and healing and memories that will bring us joy – so that we may live.
Extract taken from the book Living with Grief – Walking the Spiral written by Bairbre Cahill and published by Redemptorist Publications.