Good Grief?

Facebook often gets criticised (deservedly) for being a place where people post mindless, thoughtless, ill-advised and sometimes downright offensive images and opinions.  It's also a place where I have seen some of the most poignant, beautiful, humane, heart-warming and heart-breaking posts.

A post that struck a chord with me recently was written by a friend that began "Today, I outlived my Dad at the age of 42".  This is a point that I will also reach in the next couple of years and reading his words made me reflect on the nature of the grieving that we go through - or perhaps more specifically that I have gone through. 

So here you have it:  Some Stuff I've Learned About Grief

• It can smash you across the face and leave you struggling for breath
• It can fill you with an energy that will enable you to perform feats of superhuman strength.  Anyone who has seen a man act as pallbearer to his wife or a child follow the coffin of their parent will know what that strength looks like
• It will cause you to run from town centres in tears with nothing but sobs to offer the strangers who stop to ask you what has happened
• It can also cause you to take incredibly large risks that will make you look back at those times and want to protect the person that you were
• You end up finding milestones or markers that you hadn't expected - for me this includes when my son reached the age of my youngest brother when our dad died.  Or when I reached the age of my mother when she was widowed.  It has helped me to empathise more with how things must have been for her and thank my lucky stars for all I currently have.
• The person who has died will crop up in all sorts of places.  I thought the registrar at our wedding was going to insist on a seance, so adamant was she that I needed to recall precisely the job my dead father had before he became terminally ill despite the fact that I had a living, breathing mother in the very next room.  Hopefully that kind of 'awkward' moment will become a thing of the past soon with #mothersonmarriagecerts (read here for more).
• It can send shock waves through families that ripple on for decades and for some the waves never recede
• The people who put up with all of the tears, snot, puffy-eyes, irrational fears, panicking and maudlin moments are keepers
• We know it happens to us all in the end, but it doesn't make it any easier

But it is not all bad.  It can't be all bad.

The experience of loved ones dying and the continual process of grief reminds us that our life can be short.  It helps us to try to remember the things that are important, to put things in perspective or to notice moments of beauty and joy and remember them.

And so I sit here; 26 years to the day that my dad died and whilst I am sad, I am happy for the life that he and my mum gave me, and the life that I now have.  If grief has taught me one thing, it is that life is good.


Footnote:
If you want a more scientific view on grief, you might like to take a look at the Kubler-Ross Grief Cycle.  I've come across it twice in my life - once when studying for a psychology A-level (when it came in very bloody handy for helping me understand what the hell was going on) and secondly during an exercise discussing change in teams in a corporate setting (less useful). You can read more here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%BCbler-Ross_model

Who knows where the time goes?

Today marks an anniversary for my family - it's been 25 years since my dad died.  A very long time; and time enough for me to navigate adolescence and become an adult, a woman, a mother.  I have known my husband for longer than I knew my father and this year our marriage will number more years than those when I had both parents.  

His death, and all of the events since, seems equally a lifetime and a millisecond ago.  In 25 years I have changed entirely, and not at all; I am a middle-aged mother and the girl in her dad's cardigan.  A wife and the teenager playing All Mod Cons on repeat.  I'm writing this from the kitchen of the home I have built with my husband, and I can still remember clearly being stood in my mother's kitchen wondering why our next door neighbour was there, why my brothers were upstairs and why my dad was no longer in the living room attached to a morphine drip.  I'd only gone out with a friend for a few hours...time enough for him to slip away and for the ambulance to come.

This is not to say that my life revolves around one event but it's fair to say it's shaped me.  Death can blow bloody great holes in lives and families and I am grateful to have landed in one piece.  I mourn his passing but am happy he was in my life at all, thankful that he was my dad.

And what is a comfort is knowing that he lived and that he loved us all.  He embraced my mum in front of me and my brothers, played silly games and danced with us, fell down drunk on the path once (but only once), and rode his bike to and from work.  He did crosswords to help improve his spelling, had a nice line in vests that had a contrasting trim (in the seventies and eighties it was the law to wear these), taught us Tarzan jokes and fixed our bikes.  He was about us, and not his illness until it could no longer be hidden.

I called my mum, and as we remarked on how long it had been she said "it makes you realise what a drop in the ocean we are."  It seemed fitting, and poetic - because as with the lives of all the wonderful people that we have lost, his is still sending out ripples today.

never forgotten

Soundtrack: Who Knows Where the Time Goes - Fairport Convention