Anatomy of Grief
Over the festive period, we didn’t eat a mince pie or pull a cracker, only a few of the cards are up (we didn’t send any) we’ve barely listened to any Christmas music and we were too tired for a New Year’s Eve sing-song. We’ve had a subdued festive season - we’re still re-calibrating from loss, absence making its impression as much as presence.
I’ve trained as a bereavement counsellor - I know the stages of grief, but grieving is not linear and each person responds in their own way and their own timescales. My sister is feeling numb, burying herself in all the things there are to do, including day-to-day care for our Mum. She thinks she’s not experiencing grief, not grasping that this too is grief, the nothingness, the dissembling.
I had a stormy relationship with my Dad as you may be aware if you’ve read some of my other pieces. It went through anger, hate, forgiveness and love - in various measures and at various times, but he was a fixed part of my 61 years on earth, a stalwart in my life. I feel unstable now, as if something is off-kilter because he’s gone and I’m finding it hard to process my reactions. This helps, the writing - it’s the way I’ve always tried to understand my emotions, ever since I was a child.
We didn’t express emotions as a family, we didn’t talk about how we felt. Showing your emotions was considered a weakness. The only way I had to examine mine was by writing about them. Angst and bad poetry abound from my teenage years, but even earlier than that I was writing down the anatomy of what I was feeling. It’s actually quite a good way to process things, to be both subjective and objective. On paper, with no one seeing, you can be real and you can also examine what emerges, scrutinise it in a way that’s difficult in your head alone. If you want to talk about things with someone, it can be a useful starting point. So, whilst I would not recommend a childhood of keeping emotions at bay, I would still recommend writing what you feel either as a journal, diary or occasional pieces. Writing won’t remove my grieving - or yours. It’s not a substitute for living with loss, it’s simply one way of helping to work through the mixed emotions that come with the landscape of loss.
I’ll keep writing, as is my habit. Some of it I’ll continue to share; some of it will no doubt be too raw and unhinged for public consumption, yet I hope my own journey might help someone, somewhere
Do feel free to comment about your own experiences. Does writing about your emotions help you?
I wrote about the process of my father dying (in an induced coma for a week and all of us in a limbo) as if it was happening to someone else and found it very helpful. Ultimately I turned those snippets into something as you know. I’d recommend to anyone to write those mangled thoughts down in any deeply emotional situation but chiefly grief.
My dad was twenty years older than my mum and he died just after I'd had my second baby. He only ever met the first one. My mum died exactly ten years later, just after I'd had my fifth baby. Both deaths hit me hard, but I'm the kind of person who can't hide her emotions, who bawls all the way though funerals, at work, in the street, when telling people what has happened, and doesn't care who sees. I've written about both my parents because I loved them and because they were wonderful, interesting, talented, kind, generous people. I've never felt the need to talk or write about their deaths to 'get over it'. We don't, ever. Having a young family to bring up and deal with all the problems they brought possibly put life/death in perspective.