Goodbyes: Surviving Death and Grief

Grief, loss, bereavement: however you wish to label the pain and empty feeling that you experience when the taboo subject of death crawls up on you, the aching remains the same. Taboo subjects are such constants in our lives that I personally don’t believe in avoiding their discussion. To ignore their presence in public is to shame the celebration of their life and to create further unnecessary stress for yourself. After the recent experience (and continuing experience) of the death of a personal loved one, I found the bombardments of leaflets somewhat indelicate. Instructions and phrases such as ‘coping mechanisms’, ‘dealing with grief’ and ‘managing your loss’ are incredibly economic and remove the emotion from such a personal issue.  You don’t just experience death: you feel it and you live it. It’s inconceivable to remove the emotion from such a constant event in day-to-day life. You don’t cope or manage or deal with death: you survive it. Here are a few ways I’ve found myself surviving my own grief.

• Be dramatic

The death of a sister, a best friend, a grandfather: the pain is immense. It’s almost indescribable, but that broken phone call does feel like you’ve been gutted with a sledgehammer. It’s almost impossible to describe the emotion without being dramatic, so don’t pretend to smile or ‘cope’ when living out day-to-day life when the feelings themselves are so intense; be dramatic.

Sit in the shower, weeping beneath thousands of water droplets, drowning your eardrums in Coldplay’s ‘Fix You’ on loop for three hours straight. Find a secluded spot hidden by tree canopies, stand in the pouring rain with your hood down and converse drowning in bankside mud and write a poem full of cusses and ‘I miss you’s and ‘I’m sorry’s.

You don’t need permission to be dramatic because your entire being is occupied with the intensity and reality of such an unfortunate situation and that in itself will create equally vivid reactions. You don’t need an excuse, you don’t need permission, you just need to be.

• Distract yourself

As much as you need those moments where you need to collapse into a ball of tears and noisy sobs on your housemate’s bedroom floor, you also need to keep on living. Distract yourself with the world around you.

One of the most shocking realisations after my father ended our phone call was that, despite everything, the world continued to operate as normal. Kids continued to scream in sweet-shops, joggers continued to make their routines around the lakes, the same old couple were hand-in-hand laughing as they waited at the bus stop. It was a shock to realise that the world continued in its usual way, as if this death had never occurred, as if no one knew, as if no one cared he wasn’t here anymore. It was devastating.

However, in the most therapeutic fashion, it was also a revelation to continue in my own way. To distract myself with the ordinary activities of my own world or even to distract myself with new things. Finding the simple and the new in the darkest of corners. My most trusted circle did everything. I went for a walk around Attenborough Park and stroked a horse called ‘Cow’, I had take-out and listened to a friend dabble with his guitar, I focused on coursework research, I went and drank red wine beside a fire in Beeston with new faces, I had cocktails with my sister in a Caribbean restaurant and I bought underwear in town because I needed some new pairs.

Distractions are therapeutic, and although I relate to the guilt of temporarily ‘forgetting’ the awful reality at hand, it’s healthy. Your loved-one would want you to carry on (as cliché as it sounds). They would want you to mourn them, miss them, but they’d also want you to escape that circular pattern of loneliness and regret and guilt and distractions offer a narrow path away from that dark core.

I’m not going to lie: this is going to be with you forever. Grief and loss are constants: they don’t fade away, they don’t, but they do transform into better things and you survive that.

Longing becomes happy memories. Tears become smiles. Photos become celebrations.

Death happens. That doesn’t mean it’s less painful for anyone, but grief doesn’t destroy you. It makes you grow. You survive it.

Edited by Naomi Upton

Image Sources:

WhyToRead: http://whytoread.com/bereavement-books-dealing-loss-grief/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/401101910537294849/

WifeTalks.Wordpress.Com: http://wifetalks.com/2012/09/20/nosy-bitch/

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