I felt so very anxious the other morning.
Panicky, even.
I know why.
I had been at my youngest daughter’s school, attending a meeting.
And I was thinking about my darling niece whose husband of 10 months had died 9 days previously.
She teaches at that school. She’s not there though, now, obviously.
I was early for the meeting, and took a moment to wander around, staring at the shimmering field, and the wild bunnies scampering about.
It’s out in horsey country.
It’s that kind of school. I’ve envied my daughter that.
I caught myself leaning into my niece's experience. Trying on her life. Experimenting with her reality.
Or what I imagine it to be.
How could I possibly know, though. There are so many shades of grief, depending on who wears it.
I was considering her return to her job in weeks to come.
But now with a fractured life.
How brave she will need to be. Not that she has a choice, really.
How hollow it might feel. Empty.
How interminable each moment might be.
How she may weave between moments of intense pain and suffocation, and how there might be moments within moments when she forgets what has happened.
For a split second.
And how those moments within moments may, in the passage of time, get longer. And slowly weave together into a blanket of comfort and protection around her.
To hold her and keep her safe.
How the scorching, excruciating truth might dull a little.
Sometimes.
And how each person and distraction in her working day will likely provide opportunity to for a moment-within-a-moment of forgetting.
She has no such moments now. It’s too soon for that. Now it’s all grieving faces staring back at her, platitudes, messages, religious people, graveyards, procedures, protocols and lead-laced time.
So much time.
When her husband died - that first day, that first hour, actually, I was struck by how the clock seemed to have stopped. And I couldn’t breathe well, for the weight of that stagnation, and what it might mean for her.
If she was feeling it too.
The permanence of her life without him.
And so, as I moved into the school hall for the meeting, I carried her new life with me.
It looped through my mind as I listened to the speaker.
And then I cast my thoughts to each grieving person I’ve journeyed with in my psychology practice.
And to my own father’s traumatic death. This is my main reference point… The only thing remotely relatable, yet not relatable at all. To lose a parent in adulthood is destabilising. Awful. Wounding. Shocking.
But to lose a husband or a child is to lose a future.
Not that it’s the trauma olympics where someone has to win.
And anyway, there are so many variables and moving parts in each tragedy. I know this well, from my work.
But what made me anxious for her, in relation to my own traumatic bereavement years ago, is the DISTANCE. The distance between where she is now, and being remotely ‘ok’. It’s so far. It’s so long. It’s so arduous.
It’s so heavy, and so very lonely, though there are people offering refreshment, support, encouragement, relief. It so very long.
But I realise, now, that I’m over-burdening her, in my thoughts, with my experience.
And I’m not trusting the process and the protections that exist, naturally - maybe supernaturally - to protect her now.
She’s not thinking about the distance. She doesn’t even know of it.
She’s probably trapped in this very moment. And ironically and bizarrely, that’s a grace.
I’m on the other side of a grief journey, so I remember it ‘all at once’, all as one event.
But it wasn’t one event.
It was trillions of tiny moments strung together over years.
On the ground, the process unfolds slowly, step by step, page by page.
Not in one fell swoop. She doesn’t know the way. She only knows the next step, and each step is what she’s facing, even as I type.
She doesn’t have to do it all in a day. It takes years; it doesn’t happen all at once, like it seems in my memory.
And there’s a natural grace for each step, I think, in retrospect.
Shock is a grace. Because you know, but you also know nothing at all.
Denial is a grace. Because there’s a hope that it can be different. That it will be different.
Anger is a grace. Because it reminds us that we are somehow powerful. That we matter, and that we have agency. That we’ve been wronged.
And depression carries a grace, because it comes when we are ready to look it in the mirror with our eyes now open, and our faculties relieved of shock, denial, anger…
And acceptance. Gosh. Do we ever? In moments, in moments.
And meaning… That alleged last phase. I don’t know. I don’t know how many really get there, and more power to those who do.
Maybe we try to decide there was some point or purpose… I don’t know.
It’s too soon for me… It’s yesterday for her. And it’s too soon for most of my weary travellers too.
But there’s a process. There’s a wisdom in our constitutions. We don’t do it all at once.
There’s a grace for the journey. In that it reveals itself slowly.
I realise this now, and have calmed myself down, even on her behalf.
And this is confirmed even in my brief chats with her… I hear the “knit-one, slip-one” in her journey now. How there’s excruciating agony. Then there’s nothing. Then there’s a thought of the future, an administrative issue. Then there’s calm. Once there was a smile. Then it’s violent again. Knit-one, slip-one.
Weaving that blanket that one day might keep her safe.
All anyone can do, when flung onto that journey is the next appropriate thing. One lead-laced step at a time, dealing only with the demands of that little step.
With some wind on our backs, that we will only realise much later was even there at all.
Debbie,
Your writing and your words are so incredibly beautiful and painful and true, even for someone who hasn't experienced a loss like this. I feel the power and it hits my core, hard.
I wish you and your family ever-growing bright lights along this 'lead-laced' journey.
Sending love x