A brief history of grief…

I’ve been up and down deciding to write a sizeable post on grief. It’s an emotion that has dominated my life, made me who I am and also shown me the incredible strength of the human spirit and why we have such little time with so much to give but why we should keep giving what we have.

Here’s the beginning….

We are all going to die, a simple fact that not a lot of us confront. Most people I know have had to go through a heart breaking departure of someone close to them and we still don’t look our own fears in the eye and resolve what emotions they stir.

It seems too cruel to be given this incredible gift of life, then just when we are adjusting to how amazing it is another light goes out, a reminder that this concept of time we created will come to an end for us all.

I lost my father when I was 21 and then my mother at 35. My father passing away was the first harsh reminder that we are not here forever. If I’m honest, I didn’t grieve when he died. I had a moment where I just wanted time to stop, just for a bit, so I could lie down and cry until I felt better. You can’t ask the rollercoaster to stop just because you’re scared.

My parents didn’t have a great relationship when my dad passed away. They were sleeping in separate rooms for the last few years and arguing a lot of the time. I always thought my mum didn’t love my dad towards the end, she seemed to move on quickly when he passed and never wanted to talk about him, unless she had been drinking. The day after she died I visited her flat and found her chair that was faced to allow her to look out of the window. The floor was covered with photos of my dad alongwith a stash of letters he had written to her a long time ago. I feel I handled my mum’s death a lot better than my dad’s but when I saw this collage of history my heart ached, I realised that her years of anguish and hiding behind alcohol were an attempt to heal a broken heart when she lost her life partner.

When you’re dealing with the aftermath of a death you think you’re fine, you’re coping. It’s only when you clear the storm into the calm warmth of clarity and look back that you see the cloud that had been surrounding you, affecting your thoughts and actions.

Death highlights the areas of life that we try to ignore or pretend wont affect us just yet. The fact that we aren’t infinite in our human bodies, change is occuring all of the time and you either adapt or become stuck in a cycle of constantly living in the past and berating yourself that you deserve a better future but not actually doing anything about it. I used to try and hide my saddness, so as to not make other people feel uncomfortable, I could see the change across their eyes when I mentioned my parents passing, most of them just didn’t know what to say. I used to save crying for when I was on my own but in doing that I would sob uncontrollably as I had pent up so many sad emotions. Sometimes they would come out after drinking alcohol when I had released my inhibitions with one to many drinks. Sometimes the fear of losing the people around me would come out as a harsh word starting a bitter argument that I had allowed my subconcious to begin in a bid to determine how much these people loved me and to push them far enough to try and prove they really did want to be around me. Self doubt and loss of a loved one feed each other growing in your subconcious especially when you’re trying to hide them both from the world.

Society can, if you allow it, give you some pretty heavy bricks to carry in your life back pack. To feel that you have to do certain things and accept a generic timeline that is purely dependent on your age and potentially not relevant to what you may actually want. Strength from watching and accepting people passing away also allows you to evaluate what is important to you. In those last few moments would you rather close your eyes heavy in the knowledge that you could have lived a life that was fuller, of joy, happiness, success or would you rather close your eyes when the time comes and smile to yourself with contentment that you’ve done all you possibly could have in the time allocated on this planet in this earthly body.

Don’t accept that because you are 50 you cannot start over, you can retrain yourself, have a new career, unearth a talent that for some reason you felt you had to keep hidden from everyone else.

Don’t accept that because you are 18 you need to follow the crowd and obtain a degree and begin your path on the road to debt as you ‘think’it’s the right thing to do. If that path doesn’t light up in your minds eye as the one you know you should take, don’t take it. Deep down you know what path you want it’s just whether you trust in yourself to carve your own way, a path well trodden isn’t necessarily the right one.