Days for remembering

August 18, 2010

Memory days are perfectly ordinary days when thinking about Mottsu sort of sneaks up on me. Some days just remind me of him, quiet rainy ones in particular.

Rainy days evoke memories of Mottsu, maybe because I love how the rain falls and quietens a day. Everything shushhed, like the sound of car tyres on the wet road. I think those are days when you huddle in closer with someone, share an umbrella, shelter together. Rainy days and Mottsu and I would slip into a cinema for the afternoon. Rainy weekend evenings we’d cook, bake, roast, time in the kitchen warm and safe, nurtured. Together with nowhere else to be.

Memory days, are different to anniversaries and birthdays, or special occasions. Days when you perhaps have anticipated the remembering of someone who’s no longer here but you can just feel them present. They are days I feel more alone – if it’s possible to be more alone than everyday regular alone. Importantly I feel wistful more than bereft, and that’s comforting to recall.

He is quietly remembered and I am grieving differently. I like to remember him well.

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Who of us knows how to die?

June 6, 2010

I visited my Mum in hospital today, she is in bed 6 of her ward. After a couple of hours and as I was leaving I stopped to chat to Val in bed 5.

Val is going home tomorrow, she will be under the care of a palliative nurse who will help moderate her morphine levels. Val is not quite ready to knock on heaven’s door, but she is walking up the steps.

She has no illusions about what is happening to her, and she is afraid of dying, she said. I agreed it must be scary, I would be scared.

The thing that hurts her most are the tears in the eyes of her children when she talks to them, she said.

Val’s children love her they can’t witness her death without tears in their eyes. We can only do what we can do, and they can’t help the tears.

Who of us knows how to die? Who of us can witness the slow death of someone we love without tears in our eyes?

I reached for Val’s hand and we clung together with warmth, caring and fear.

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To thank or not thank

April 28, 2010

Eight months after Mottsu died, as Christmas approached I had some cards made. On the front was a photo taken in the 60s, Mottsu on the knee of Father Christmas. As a labour of love or an act of contrition I mailed out 150 little cards with a personal note written in each.

Inside was a quote by Virginia Woolf:

“Each has his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart and his friends can only read the title”

That quote was especially poignant to me in the light of suicide, it helped reassure me about my not understanding of what happened.

Bud Tingwell in the opening chapter of his biography, written by Peter Wilmoth, hoped that he would be forgiven for not acknowledging all the kind cards that were sent after the death of his wife. He just wasn’t up to it, at the time. I wonder now if it was the opening chapter, that’s how I remember what he said, a loud and lingering regret.

I was driven by what had haunted Bud and I was determined not to harbour similar regrets. I had enough regrets to live with, not sending thank yous didn’t have to be one of them.

There are two schools of thought, Miss Manners thinks sending notes is the decent thing to do. and one that says Miss Manners is WRONG about thank you notes for condolence cards. It’s up to you.

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Recovering from Grief

April 26, 2010

I listened to a war correspondent talking today about war and the effects on soldiers. He said that war, like grief, was something we don’t ever recover from. He meant that when you go through war (or grief) you never get back to where (or particularly who) you were. Grief, he did say grief I caught it as a quick mention and it started me thinking.

It’s interesting because I do think there is something a little wrong (or at best not quite right) with the idea of fixed or better. There is not enough room for being different. As a society we are fixated on being fixed, I mean as in getting back to where you were, as much as possible returning to who you were before the traumatic war/grief event. I think there is too much emphasis on being fixed and not enough on allowing ourselves to adopt an identity that integrates and accepts our experiences.

Recovery, from grief at least, is over rated. Maybe it is the same with bouts of depression..

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Bring it on world…

April 10, 2010

There is a phenomena when you go through something big, traumatic, or devastating that as things start to normalise, in the aftermath, you feel invincible.

Well, to be honest, it is not quite a phenomena, I have a sample population of one; me.

In the early days of grieving Suz, a friend and colleague, came to visit. Suz was a welcome visitor, she didn’t look to me for direction or conversation. She told me stories of the office and the things I hadn’t missed. She made us a cup of tea. She broke my teapot.

She was horrified, she had come to make things a little better not break something.

I assured her it was just a teapot, things were easy for me to put into perspective. A teapot would hardly be missed. She eventually laughed at the situation and told me that with what I had been through, nothing else would ever be as bad.

Suz suggested I could shake my fists at the sky and defy the world to bring it on…

I loved the idea, I identified with the brazenness of daring the world to hit me again. I did feel invincible, or at least audacious. That’s when I first knew I was going to get through. My own realisation, my own phenomena.

Bring it on world…

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Talking about it

March 31, 2010

Get me to a counsellor….

I thought help would help, and as self-sufficient as I like to be regarded, I needed help. It seemed only sensible to draw on some professional help. Navigating through grief on my own wasn’t something I felt capable of.

Counselling was also something I felt uncertain about. I hadn’t participated in counselling before. Mottsu saw a psychologist for a couple of weeks and, ultimately, that hadn’t gone so well. There was no blame to be laid. I don’t exactly know what went on for him, but counselling didn’t kill Mottsu.

Along with being self-sufficient, I knew myself as critical of others, particularly others who might have been trying to help me. Sharing with a stranger was going to be difficult for me and woe-betide the counsellor across from me in the client’s seat. I decided to try up to five counsellors, before giving up on that avenue of potential support. Five counsellors? It must have been me against the world back then. Fortunately I made a pact with myself to be patient with the process and find someone with whom I had rapport and could work with. I decided there was no better option than counselling. Did I have another option?

Bereft and almost disabled by grief I was unsure of where to turn mainly because I didn’t know where to look, how to start. I didn’t know anybody who was in therapy, not anyone who saw a counsellor – it later turned out I did know quite a few who had that type of support, we just hadn’t talked about it back then.

There is something in Australian psyche where we are expected to suck it up or toughen up and get over it. That is how we are, asking for help didn’t come easily for me.

After a rocky start, I now unreservedly (not entirely without reserve but that’s another post) recommend counselling, I prefer to call it therapy – for me it is the treatment.

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What would lead you to not crack up and quit?

March 21, 2010

It was 21 May 2006, I was returning to Melbourne after the City to Casino run, flight QF1012 and sitting in 4C. I still have the boarding pass it has been preserved between the pages of the book I read on that flight.

Joseph Campbell’s Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation.

“You might ask yourself the question: if I were confronted with a situation of total disaster, if everything I loved and thought I lived for were devastated, what would I live for? If I were to come home and find my family murdered, my house burned up, or my career wiped out by some disaster or another, what would sustain me? We read about these thing every day and we think, well that only happens to other people. But what if it happened to me? What would lead me to know that I could go on living and not just crack up and quit?

…In our day, however, there is great confusion. We’re thrown back on ourselves and we have to find that thing which, in truth, works for us as individuals. Now how does one do this?” (p. 88)

There are some big questions asked in that passage. I was finding my feet, clad in running shoes. I was up and running, my direction was not so clear, but becoming clearer. There was no set destination. Importantly/amazingly/defiantly I had gone on living, I hadn’t cracked up and quit, it had almost happened while on auto-pilot, without thinking about what next…

I did sit around for a while hoping to be wakened from a nightmare, or to be rescued. That evening Campbell’s words resonated, I realised the importance of finding what worked for me as an individual. It was two years and two months since Mottsu’s death, that’s how long it took before starting to emerge from mourning.

That was me, it will be different for you.

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Living each day

March 19, 2010

However far I have run and however far I have come, some days have more sadness than others.

Loneliness sort of creeps up…

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief. CS Lewis

That was true before, it is mostly easier now.

Grief and memories and sadness still lurk around.

There in the shadows.

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*I couldn’t care less

February 5, 2010

I could always care more, but I can’t care any less – that is I couldn’t care less about people traversing emotional peaks and valleys. I do care.

I was talking with James recently when he dropped his voice to confide that a counsellor he’d been seeing, since a friend’s suicide, asked if he had been angry yet. “Angry?” James said, “I haven’t been angry”. Maybe it wasn’t what he meant but I understood James to be asking if there was something wrong.

Anger, the accepted second stage.

Sancho

Was the counsellor suggesting that without it he might not be healing? The only thing wrong with James was the growing suspicion that there might be something wrong with his grief. There was nothing wrong, or even complicated with James grieving process. As far as I could tell he had good grief, and a healthy capacity for resilience. I think it is more that grief is not understood and (angry or not) we don’t get to share it enough by talking about the experience.

In unrelated circumstances James and I both discovered that: “Many mourners experience grief as a kind of isolation—one that is exacerbated by the fact that one’s peers, neighbors, and co-workers may not really want to know how you are. We’ve adopted a sort of “ask, don’t tell” policy. The question “How are you?” is an expression of concern, but mourners quickly figure out that it shouldn’t be mistaken for an actual inquiry.” Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved? Meghan O’Rourke: The New Yorker, February 2010

I don’t think it is that friends and colleagues couldn’t care less, they just don’t know what to say, or how to care more.

*Thanks Kate, who turned around the phrase ‘I couldn’t care less’ to explain why one cares so much.

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Finding a better way to grieve

February 4, 2010

I have railed against the Stages of Grief, and thank my dear friend Charlotte for sharing a recent article; a meaningful analysis of the work of Dr Kubler-Ross and others on bereavement.

“Though Kübler-Ross captured the range of emotions that mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an grief and grieving process—sometimes one that never fully ends.” Good Grief: Is there a better way to be bereaved? Meghan O’Rourke: The New Yorker, February 2010

For me the discussion in the article normalises an intense experience that brought out a personal, if at times crazed, response. When it comes to healing, we have an internal medicine cabinet stocked full of emotions to draw on. As you might expect when self-prescribing some responses might be considered less healthy choices. Be reassured, there is no right answer.

O’Rourke quotes Gorer who has noted a silencing of the mourner: “Today it would seem to be believed, quite sincerely, that sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression, and indulged, if at all, in private, as furtively as . . . masturbation.”

Soused in grief I was bereft, bewildered and at times punchy. There were times I felt so disapproved of, I might as well have been masturbating in public. The ‘tuts’ and ‘tsks’ were palpable. It is good to recognise that the process is only as predictable as it is unpredictable, and not expect too much of others, or yourself.

To recap and align my own experience with the well known Stages of Grieving, looks a bit like this:

Stage 1
Dr. Kubler-Ross: Denial and Isolation: “This is not happening to me.”
Me: Realisation and weeping; “This is happening to me”

Stage 2
Dr. Kubler-Ross: Anger and Resentment: “Why me?”
Me: Guilt and self recrimination: “I did it”

Stage 3
Dr. Kubler-Ross: Bargaining: “Yes me, but. . .”
Me: Running away “Get me out of here”

Stage 4
Dr. Kubler-Ross: Depression: “Yes, me.”
Me: Depression: “Not me”

Stage 5
Dr. Kubler-Ross: Acceptance
Me: Emptiness

When dealing with loss, trust your own compass and make your own path through, grief is good. Complicated, untidy, ongoing, and good.

To my loved friends who stuck with me a warm and heartfelt thanks, it has been some trek. Namaste.

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