Stage 3 – the widely accepted version – Bargaining: “Yes me, but. . .”
This is often a period of temporary truce after experiencing resentment. People attempt to bargain with their higher power by asking, “If I do this, will you erase the loss?”

Stage 3 – my version - Running away “Get me out of here”
I returned to work and found that it was hard to reintegrate with a world that kept moving while I sat at home weeping and listening to the fridge. During this stage I was unable to visit the supermarket without being taunted by songs of everlasting love playing through the aisles and having to flee.

I took up every offer to work away from home travelling to China, Hobart, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Sydney and the US on business establishing a relentless pace and somehow managing to cope with that. My tax records show 27 trips in the first year. The number surprises me now, it’s a bit of a blur.

Hotels were fabulous places to retreat to, everything provided and everything done. The bed made, the room tidied, no shopping, no cooking, no bins to put out and work to consume all the hours of the day. Work distracted me, more than that, it engulfed me. My life was girt by airports.

I also start to run, I don’t quite know how running emerged, I had never been a jogger. There was effort and sweat, gradual achievements and daily exhilaration. It wasn’t a conscious thought but maybe if a plane couldn’t take me far enough from the memories then my feet could. More about the challenge and pleasure of running soon, today is bargaining…

Bargaining? Maybe I did bargain somewhere in the blur of running away, maybe I was too realistic to beg, pray, or wish for a different deal. While I think bargaining is strange grief behaviour, maybe it is no stranger than running away.

My advice is to follow yourself where ever that leads.

I sometimes read the mail in my spam folder.

When I discover something like the one headed ‘Big Savings for Crysis’ spam is instantly worthwhile. I am rewarded.

A crysis that is what bereavement is…

Like I said in a previous post Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’ Five Stages of grief are assumed by many to be universally applicable to anyone suffering bereavement. It is possible then that, if you are grieving, you may try to track your experience against this well known map of the terrain to determine where you are and what is yet ahead.

Mapping grief by stages may be good and my advice is to do it with a ‘pinch of salt’. The salt is intended to make the theory more palatable – while you, amid the oppressive throes of lament, maintain some measure of scepticism about the direct applicability of any given stage of grief to yourself.

Grieving is an intense and personal experience, uniquely yours.

Stage 1 – the widely known version – Denial and Isolation: “This is not happening to me.”
This is the stage in which you refuse or are unable to acknowledge a loss has occurred. It may be brief or long and is often characterized by withdrawing from others. The first stage is often not a literal denial of the death, but a disbelief that the event has really happened. Denial allows one to cope with the loss initially while engaging other coping strategies to shift to the next stage when ready.

Stage 1 – my version – Realisation and weeping: “This is happening to me.”
I am living my nightmare there is no denying what has happened. The loss is real. There is a realisation that one of the horrible things that happen to other people has happened to you. The only defence mechanism is tears and I didn’t know it was possible to cry so much. It did occur to me that to lose so much liquid through one’s tear ducts might be a potential weight loss mechanism and that I could be skinny, if somewhat parched and shrivelled. I used boxes of tissues, crying everywhere I went and at everything.
I will admit, in defence of the applicability of the Five Stages, friends did not agree with my prognosis that Mottsu would never return. He drove away at 10:15 on a Monday morning. It was around 5pm that day, and long after he failed to return for lunch that I found his (recent) DIY Will in his satchel. That’s when my stage 1 of Realisation and Weeping kicked in.

Panicked I presented a couple friends with my (scant – they thought it insubstantial, ominous – I thought it weighty) evidence:
• Unknown whereabouts
• Depressed state of mind
• Journal from 2 weeks prior, documenting that troubled frame of mind
• Will (we had talked about having Wills prepared and he thought the action bode ill)
• Missed meals

While accepting the situation was uncharacteristic of Mottsu, they didn’t think we were facing a problem. Probably some sort of a well-intentioned denial intended to reassure me. [I was] over-reacting, [I was] over-wrought. He was OK and would return…

I was not reassured, nor did I believe I was over-reacting given [my version of] reality. The disbelief of others pushed me way past Stage 1 before official grieving commenced.

Distraught and muddled I was relieved to be taken seriously by the police when I stumbled into the local station at dusk that day. I can’t believe that I do believe what’s happening. It’s an acceptance not a denial.

So much for Stage 1….

Numbers are symbols we use to measure by, and beyond summing the fingers or toes on one hand or foot, I had never really attributed special significance to the number five.
A mathematician might smile knowing that numbers have more to reveal than the rest of us are able to acknowledge. A quick view of Wikipedia, the modern oracle, will reveal rational and irrational numbers, prime, negative, complex even hypercomplex numbers, mythical numbers, transcendental and figurative, the special qualities of numbers start to look innumerable. Five is an integer, a prime and a Fibonacci number. Five is a Pell, Markov, Perrin and a Sierpinski number. I read that five is conjectured to be the only odd untouchable number.

Gimme five…

Apparently five is an interesting number. There are five oceans, we have five senses, and in traditional Japanese society there are five virtues. I’m also compelled to mention Enid Blyton’s Famous Five. My overriding interest in five is the five stages of grieving that came out of Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross ground-breaking work with dying people. The Five Stages of Grief are regarded as common knowledge and assumed by many to be universally applicable to anyone suffering bereavement.

Having reflected on the stages of grief I went through, after suffering the traumatic loss Mottsu through suicide, I feel that my experience has a little in common with the five stages of grieving based on Dr Kubler-Ross’ published works. I appreciate that her intent and the full wealth of her experiences with the dying and grieving are not readily summarised. The stages of bereavement must not be easy to generalise about and my experience was a little different, like the rest of you I like to think of myself as somewhat unique.

Grief is as personal as other emotions we experience and I’m documenting my journey to share in this blog. I can’t help myself, I was never any good at keeping secrets or being particularly discrete. My grieving was such a roller coaster of experiences all delivered in living technicolour and dolby surround sound, that sometimes my only refuge from the full-screen experience was to journal episodes. I could always write myself back to sanity by recording the madness of the rest of the world (if not myself) through it all.

Maybe it is true that there is strength in numbers. I will summarise my own five stages of experience in subsequent entries.

Put the statement “Look after yourself”. at the top of the list of things not to say to someone who has just had someone close to them die.

What does it mean anyway? Am I not looking after myself ? Sure, I would be first to acknowledge that I could be eating better, sleeping better, smiling more. I am coping and getting by. Looking after myself as best I can.

I first noticed my Mum saying ‘Look after yourself…’. I know, I know it’s well intended. I also wondered how I was supposed to take care of myself, I had two dogs to feed and a bin that needed regular putting out, no end things to look after ….

The refrain became a chorus, the message “look after yourself” became a tag line to many conversations. It came in person, in email and over the phone. It came not only from my mum, but my my siblings, from friends, from people I hardly knew. My psychologist suggested I be kind to myself, that I look after myself. Work colleagues and near strangers gave the same advice. Where do I even start? The responsibility was too great, and secretly I longed to be rescued. I needed a hero, having lost the one I had.

I was repeatedly advised to look after myself. Damn well intentioned advice but distressing nonetheless. It made me feel vague and hopeless. Did I look unkempt, sallow or unwell? Of course I wasn’t really looking after myself, and felt undeserving of any such care but still resented the uninvited counsel.

It was one of the last things Mottsu said to me. Two days before he left and we were working in the garden shovelling soil preparing for planting. Saturday, and he thought I missed lunch, he didn’t see me eat anything. He gripped my arm and looked at me seriously “Darling, you have to eat lunch, you have to look after yourself” he chastised. I’m angry that he dispensed that advice knowing he was going to look after himself by leaving. He had already carefully planned that cruel and final action and expected I would be able to look after myself in the aftermath.

I did tell him in our last conversation that I would be OK if he was to leave me and I would recover and be able to get on with things, but that’s another story. It was a promise unfairly elicited. I didn’t know just what I was signing up for.

Mottsu was always my hero and without him I was damsel in distress. It’s was struggle to know who or how I was let alone how to look after some lost self.

I hate the pathetic weeping person I become and mostly the bad days outnumbered the good. I couldn’t ask for help, I did’t want people to know how pathetic and needy I was. I wanted to recover and I didn’t want to recover, deep down I felt I didn’t deserve to, guilt constantly whispered that I was undeserving. I was also addicted to the heightened emotional state of despairing and reluctant to let it go.

Mottsu had always looked after me, and taken out the bin. He indulged me and let me have my way too often, he ignored my inner bitch even when it emerged and sat with us on the couch. And he understood my deep need for constant reassurance. He always took my side and always held my hand.

I don’t want to look after myself, stop telling me to look after myself.