It is six months now since my father died. His death was not unexpected, and in many ways was a considerable relief, but death is always a shock. The combination of the finality of death and the reminder of our own mortality shakes us up.
If you read about grieving there is often a suggestion that it’s a process we go through; there are stages of grief and descriptions of how we might expect to feel. We experience denial, isolation, anger, depression, acceptance. Or maybe it’s numbness, pining, disorganisation and despair, and finally recovery. It all depends which book you read.
It’s almost as though grief, like everything else nowadays, has a sell-by date, after which we return to normal. Except that we don’t. Grief isn’t well-behaved, it doesn’t follow the prescribed stages in any sort of order, or sometimes at all, and normality will not be resumed. You’ll never be the same again. You will live with the loss, you will adjust. But you won’t “get over” it.
All sorts of aspects of grief have troubled me – a sense of lethargy, an inability to make even simple decisions, an exaggeration of my normal tendency to put off decisions until the last minute, or not make them at all if possible; a lack of motivation to do anything new; a reluctance to resume ongoing projects that somehow got shelved after Dad’s death; strange very lucid dreams of all sorts, but especially involving those closest to me – I find myself putting off going to bed. Grief even contributes to our physical condition, and simple physical problems (like arthritic knees and stomach pains) cause more problems than before.
Grief will rear its head at unexpected moments, plunging you back into anger, despair, depression or lethargy. Tears will flow at quite unpredictable stimuli. Your patience may suddenly run out and you’ll lash out at people, often those you love the most. You can flip from depression to euphoria without any discernible reason, or sometimes simply feel numb, as though your emotions had been neatly cut away from you in some fiendish surgery.
It’s as if you suddenly don’t know who you are. You look in the mirror and realise you ’re living with a stranger who is unreliable and temperamental. And you have to cope with this stranger alone, because the chances are you won’t let anyone else in emotionally. You might just be adding a dollop of guilt on top of all this, because all your nearest and dearest are having to cope with this stranger too.
Logically it seems my faith should sustain me. I know I have a loving heavenly Father and a Saviour who will never let me go, but there is an emotional disconnection. This knowledge seems to have been withheld from the stranger that is grieving, leaving me more alone than ever.
There are loads of books and articles about grieving – there’s a whole industry based on bereavement, but much of the literature is full of quick, glib fixes. Life doesn’t work like that. Grief is messy, chaotic, and unpredictable. And grief may well continue to disrupt your life for far longer than people imagine.
But if you are grieving, remember that many others will understand the nature of life under these circumstances, they have been there, maybe they are still there. Unlike Queen Victoria, we don’t necessarily wear our grief on our sleeves, so we don’t always recognise those affected. Loss is part of life. We survive, but we are changed forever.
JR 15/6/2018