So much sadness.
And the tyranny of not being able to talk about it.
There is no taboo associated with event based sadness.
If something really bad happens in your life, due to circumstances beyond your control, it is usually ok to talk about it.
My wife died. I have good reason to be sad. Public displays of my kind of sadness are perfectly acceptable. And it is socially acceptable for me to talk about being this kind of sad. I have the “right kind” of sadness.
More pertinently to this post it is socially acceptable for other people to talk to me about my kind of sadness. My sadness has obvious cause and overt expression, and so people are more comfortable than usual about broaching the sadness subject with me.
I am a “safe”, approachable saddo.
In fact I have become a bit of a sadness magnet.
It sounds like a nightmare, but it is actually a privilege.
Lots of very nice people have taken the time to speak properly to me about Rachel’s death and its impact on my daughters and I. By properly I mean the intimate, candid kind of talking where you do actually burden people with the truth, and where they genuinely want to hear it. The kind of talking that really does help.
In praise of counsel.
If there is a wafer thin silver lining to this whole bereavement thing it is my transformation from your typical taciturn guy, resolutely reticent, to someone who feels completely comfortable talking about his emotions. I never knew I had it in me.
Such is the extent of the transformation that I have started to see a counsellor. This would have been unthinkable twelve months ago. I could not have envisaged a situation, and that includes the death of my wife, in which I would seek “professional help”.
I use those inverted commas for deliberate effect. The phrase has derogatory undertones.”You need professional help” is far more likely to be an insult than it is to be smart advice from a concerned and supportive friend.
Well, for the record, counselling is great. I have found someone I trust and like and we meet on a weekly basis.
I talk. She listens. She prompts. She listens some more. Then she makes observations, offers explanations, imposes some order on the chaos and makes practical, actionable suggestions.
We are working our way through what I call The Pie Chart Of Shit.
The version above is much simplified and who knows if the proportions bear any relation to what is actually happening inside my head?
And that, for me, is the whole point of counselling; professional help to make sense of things and gain that sense of proportion. It is working.
Brushes and battles.
I have also discovered, and this has been a revelation, that lots of people, many more than I could have imagined, have either had brushes with serious sadness or are currently locked in battle with it. Regrettably they don’t always get the same much-needed therapeutic opportunities to talk about it that I do.
In some small, fortunate way it would appear that my safe, event based sadness can act as a convenient conversational ice-breaker for people who have their own sadness to talk about.
We start off talking about me. But pretty soon we’re discussing them.
Some people have event based stories similar to my own. And it quickly becomes apparent that there is no such thing as normal when it comes to the manifestation of grief.
But some talk about struggles with the kind of demons that don’t lend themselves as readily to polite conversation. They have the “wrong kind” of sadness in the eyes of society.
And some go as far as to mention the D word.
All of them clearly welcome the opportunity to talk.
The sense of blessed relief at being able to share feelings, without fear of judgement or stigmatisation, is palpable.
I am no professional help but I sense that just listening and offering a few amateur crumbs of comfort does make a difference.
The tyranny of not feeling able to talk.
All this reminds me of what my wife and I used to call the tyranny of the school gate.
Lots of first time mums and a few first time dads swapping child raising stories at the beginning and end of each nursery school day. All of them putting on a brave face, pretending that everything is fine. None of them telling the truth, or certainly not the whole truth. All of them wrestling with some issue or other with little Jonny or Julie.
They would all benefit from knowing that they are not alone in not having the perfect child nor the perfect parental experience. Instead they conspire to make matters far worse for each other through public declarations of perfection, which serve only to mask private fears of inadequacy.
It is only some time later (maybe a year or more) that someone finally cracks and admits to having a nightmare. The floodgates open. Suddenly everyone is talking openly about this problem and that. Suddenly everyone is admitting that they have pretended otherwise for the last twelve months, wishing out loud that if only they had all said so sooner…
So much sadness.
There is so much sadness out there.
And the tragedy is that, by definition, there is so much potential support out there too, hidden in full view. If only people realised that they are not alone in feeling the way they do. If only people felt more able to talk openly about their issues they would find that help from trusted personal sources is closer to hand than they could possibly imagine.
