Grievers, you are not alone. We offer our grief stories here in hope that our lived experiences provide a kind of connection, possibly a shred of solace, a knowing that others may have felt or experienced some of the same things you are experiencing.
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Story One
Grief has turned my world upside down, each time differently, each time creating a gulf between me and the rest of the world. I miss my mom every day. I carry her with me. I try to imagine what my brother would look like at this age, and I can’t.
What do I remember about the early grief days? Feeling alone, broken, not understood. Feeling helpless to help others in our shared grief. Feeling angry, shocked, guilty. Being swamped by unexpected grief tidal waves. Wanting to walk outside my front door and walk forever. Being exhausted beyond comprehension. Desperately searching for signs of the people gone, trying to reach them through some invisible wall, knowing they are somewhere just beyond my understanding. Hating holidays, anniversaries. It took me years to put up a proper Christmas tree again.
Finding ways to connect again, building flowerbeds, giving to charity, helping others in their honour. Wresting with meaning and purpose, the shortness of life, what to do with this box of darkness. Reaching out to others on the same path, bearing witness to their pain, honouring their love and losses with them.
I could not have wobbled through these experiences without nature. I dug and cried in the garden. I fed birds and created little garden spaces for them. I dried flowers like my mom. I walked up hills, by the sea and in the quiet places. I nurtured seedlings in a greenhouse. Inside, I tended houseplants that gently grew and trailed over the rooms.
And my sweet Maya – my labrador who joined us after I lost my mom – has kept watch over me daily, providing constant companionship, unconditional love and a ‘knowing’ that exists only with tuned-in animals and people. Maya has made all darkness bearable. She, alongside Roxy (who joined us a few years later), helped me rediscover sunrises, the peace of the sea and the beauty of stillness and togetherness.
In all of this, there is a calling, which I’m slowly unravelling. There is something in this, for me, about talking about how we collectively honour and support each other, how we gently help each other through our individual journeys, how we share both our pain and our sources of strength and how we use our time.
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Story Two
Speaking from experience with the recent loss of my friend, grief is a horrible thing and can be extremely physically and mentally draining. Even though I knew a few days before that the event was possible it doesn’t stop hitting you like a tonne of bricks when it does happen. I had a constant headache and a pain in stomach for days. It made me want to isolate myself and not speak to others in the same situation as I thought I was burdening them with my grief. Personally I had to call various other people when it happened and let them know which I thought would help me in accepting the tragic situation. Unfortunately I think it actually made me push my own grief aside to help others. Being young and a lot of my friends not having lost many people in their lives it made me realise that everyone deals with grief in different ways. Some of us have fully accepted it whilst others feel like myself and don’t think it has fully hit me yet. I went to see my friends family and sat for hours talking about memories and looking at pictures. The next day I felt invisible I felt like it really helped me and for a day or so that was great. I later realised that through talking through memories I still feel like she’s still here. I am going to the funeral home on Wednesday to say my goodbye which I thought I would get a chance too at the hospital. Many of my friends aren’t comfortable with that. I then have the funeral Friday and I don’t feel like it will really sink in until then.
However I do feel like I now have an angel looking out for me and that God will never give me more than I can bare, I think it’s important to remember that often. Surrounding myself with family and friends has helped me in hard times over the last few weeks and I think will continue to do so over the next few months.
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Story Three
Part one:
Grief is different depending on who has left your life. But, there is a common thread – your life is different forever.
I have grieved for dead friends lost when we were teenagers and it was so hard to even process that loss. I have grieved for a parent who died when I was still a teenager and had no idea how to express it. I have grieved for lost pets who take with them more of our lives than we realize were invested in them until they are gone. The worst grief in my experience, is the grief when the person who is your partner in life dies.
This grief disoriented me so that sometimes I literally felt like I was floating away. It was a chasm in my life that swallowed me whole and from which it took me a couple of years to climb out of. It is still a line of demarcation in my life – there is before Karen died and after Karen died and the lives lived in each is different entirely. 16 years on there are still moments when waves of grief can wash over me triggered by songs, events, fragrances…in short, it never goes away; but it definitely gets less debilitating over time.
This my experience with grief.
Part two:
I have some further thoughts on grief. I began to think more about the clear fact that the basic thing about the death of someone in your life is that your life will change and how that ties into the emotions surrounding grief. Why do we experience the range of emotions that we do in the grief process?
In my personal experience the sadness I felt was the same for each loss if in different degrees. That sadness was at the loss of the joy that the person who had died had brought to my life. Self-centered as that may sound, grief really is a self-centered process.
I was angry for a bit with Karen because she died of comorbitiies brought on by genetics she was well aware of but exacerbated nonetheless. How could she not value her life and ours so?
The only time I ever experienced any denial about the death of a loved one was the death of my father. I did not know how to deal with all the feelings and there was no mental health/emotional support for me so I simply denied that his death was going to be a big deal in my life. That did not go well -and I heartily recommend that no one be in this phase of grief for very long.
So, finally to acceptance. No matter the depth of the grief, eventually we have to come to accept that we are still alive and what do we do with that fact? So many options. For some of us, we have to come to forgiveness for the person who left us that did so because they chose to do things that led to their death. For others it is just accepting that joy is still part of their life or could be if given a chance. You can either knit back the fabric of your life with the repair evident but acceptable. Or, you can make a new life, a different life but one that nevertheless does seek joy again.
It is my not professional opinion that if you cannot navigate the acceptance part of grief you will not be happy again ever and you will forever be locked in the closet of grief, a closet of sadness and bitterness and anger.
Well, the very fact that I still have so many thoughts about grief tells you that it does not go away – it is something always with you and a constant process to work through.
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Story Four
Just a very brief note here of my experience when my Mum died of bowel cancer aged 62 and then my Dad from Parkinson’s/old age at 90. In both cases, they had endured such pain and distress over long periods of time (and we in our own way suffered with/for them) that death came as a relief/release. What went before was so difficult to watch and live with that there was almost a physical lightening of terrible pressure. I was just so glad for them that they were no longer suffering. The grieving for them I felt had been in watching their long and difficult journeys and I could only feel relieved and happy for them. I think what I’m saying is, there is a massive difference between a sudden, unexpected death and one which comes like a bolt from the blue and knocks your feet from under you. I missed my parents terribly but my grieving process as I say was almost laid to rest with them.
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Story Five
In 2019 I got a call from my aunt. I was busy and didn’t hear it. I got a barrage of texts from her. She never calls or texts me. We’re not close and don’t talk often. I called her back and she told me my dad died. It was like being punched even though I hadn’t spoken to him in well over a decade. Why we were estranged is not so important, just that we truly were and I’d written that relationship off. Or I thought I did. But I didn’t feel grief and pain for him. I was feeling it for me. That final nail in the coffin of what I’d never have. I’ll never have the dad I’ve seen other people have. The dad that cared. The dad that wanted to get to know you. The dad to support you and be proud of you. I was grieving the certainty of never having a dad like I’d always wanted. And it broke me. My poor husband was at a loss. He’d never met the man and was confused why it impacted me so much. Grief isn’t always about losing someone you had, it can be about losing someone you never had but always wished you did.
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Story Six
And the surprising thing is, you do still live, you do still breathe and there is joy, new joy, unexpected joy, love, hope and glimpses of a future. But there is a hole, things now forever missing, a hand I can’t hold, a conversation now just in the air, a loss that is unrequited because I can’t tell him that I loved him absolutely.
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Story Seven
GRIEVING AN ABUSER
My elder sister G abused myself and my brother from a very young age, physically, mentally and sexually. It wasn’t until I reached my late 40s that I understood she was a narcissist. She was also a chronic and dysfunctional alcoholic. It also wasn’t until my late 40s that I had any belief in myself, my strengths, qualities, abilities, intelligence and values. This came about during a year of clinical analytical therapy after a suicide attempt, a result of my inability to cope anymore with the mental torture she inflicted on me for 4 years after our mothers death, fighting over a very straightforward will. In hindsight, it was one of the best things to happen to me.
Some 2 years after this, G died at the age of 57 from alcohol related issues. Her narcissism and alcoholism had alienated just about everyone, and her body lay undetected for around a week over Christmas until her neighbour noticed he hadn’t seen her in a while and that her lights were on 24/7. Such was the degree of our alienation, it took the police a while to track me down. When they finally did at 7am one morning, I felt a sense of inevitability about her death, like it was an ending I already knew. There were no tears, no guilt, no anger, no shock, no real deviation from my daily routine. I got dressed and went to work as normal, taking time out to inform different family members as the day went on. By this stage my parents and my brother had also passed away so there was no real need for the usual gathering of family associated with these times. Life just carried on.
There is a lot of officialdom to deal with in cases of sudden death, post mortem, investigation for potential foul play etc and I just dealt with these as they came up. I DIDN’T feel detached, I was VERY attached as I was the only one left to carry out all that had to be done, including arranging a funeral that no one wanted to attend and writing a eulogy that no one wanted to hear. Was there sadness? Yes, though of a different kind when one loses a sibling. Sadness over wasted opportunity, that things could have been so much better for everyone had she not been as she was. While she had been alive I had come to accept what she had put me through and was able to move on productively with my life. On writing her eulogy, I actually felt very sad for her and truly realised that her life must have been a pretty awful one to live. It wasn’t pity, it was genuine, heartfelt sadness for another human being. Throughout the years there HAD been the odd glimpses of what could have been, and it was sad to think that G missed out on so much of the happiness enjoyed between my parents, my brother and myself. I DID persuade some extended family members to attend her funeral, and while it was certainly one of the less ‘conventional’ funerals I had ever been to, I know it was very fitting and respectful of her. It was also a learning curve for me. People expected (and perhaps, wanted?) me to be full of bitterness and anger but I followed my own instincts. Her life was chronicled according to her passions and quirkiness, and the ugly parts were referred to without blame. I was able to truly forgive her and honestly hoped she had found the peace that had eluded her in life. I initially thought I was giving her a dignified send off for my deceased mum and dads sake, but I quickly realised that I did it because I was CHOOSING to be a better person, not the person she would have wanted me to be – angry, bitter, dramatic. And with that I felt I had finally become ME. In the years that followed, I came to thank her for her part in helping me be the person I am today, one I finally rather like and am pretty proud of.