Being rubbish at grief

I’m really rubbish at grieving.

I don’t know how to do it, and I wish that someone would draft a manual to help me, because I know it’s not great to keep things inside and to not face them head on. But I’m only just realising this now. And I wonder if it might be too late.

I haven’t lost many people and, for that, I’m thankful. But my problem is it all seems to have come at once for me, and I know as I get older, this is probably not going to get easier. As people start to age, at a rapid rate it seems, it’s just nature’s way that their bodies and minds will start to fail, and as the years race by, the only thing we can be certain of is that we can’t stop the passage of time.

I do absorb grief. And I do understand the painful acknowledgement that someone has gone and they’re never coming back. I know they should live on in memories, but it’s not the same as being with them, is it? Sharing words, laughter, drinks, food, walks. Hearing their voice. Feeling all that familiar.

So, what do I do? I push it out of my head whenever possible and I just crack on. The equivalent to pulling my socks up. I get on with it. Life goes on, doesn’t it? I don’t allow myself time to even cry over it. But then, I think I’m finding that loss doesn’t really like it when you do that. It sits on your shoulder like a small, invisible bug, and it watches your every move, shaking its head from time to time as you lurch from one adventure to another, chasing the sun, running away from the darkness of the past and avoiding the future as you immerse yourself into life’s big hot tub haven. Your own version of heaven.

But the bug is there always, and it seems to be waiting for something.

I’ve found there’s only so much you can push to the back of an overflowing mind. There’s only so much emotion you can quash. There’s only an infinite amount of feeling you can divorce from your heart until something inside you starts to die because of it.

That’s where I am.

Loss.

My beautiful friend, Helen. Talented, artistic, creative, just turned 50, cancer eating away at her face. I couldn’t even bring myself to visit her in the hospice and I didn’t go to her funeral. I did have a beautiful, technicolour dream about her when she passed and I thought that was enough for me, to know she had been transported to a wonderful, Greek island, surely that was okay. I got really ill after that. I don’t know if it was symptomatic. I don’t know if my grief made me ill. But I never reconciled this feeling.

My dad – a sudden heart attack, then all the different emotions it brings when a parent has been quite estranged. And all the things you thought you might feel about that, suddenly don’t make any sense. He was never there, he never did any of the things good parents do with children, his absence lasted a lifetime. But suddenly his absence grew into a huge void, because there needed to be a space where all the words you never said had to go, and you knew that they were never going to be heard. When my dad died, I was in my kitchen, and I felt so dizzy with a pain in my chest. Then I got the call. Again, I went into robot mode. I don’t think this is good. Because this is just another layer of grief. I do remember crying this time. At odd times. But not much. Again, the bug sits there on my shoulder and reminds me that I should let it out more.

Then my lover, a beautiful man – he’s not dead. But our relationship needed to end, so I was the one that dealt the killer blow. But again, instead of doing this properly, with communication and goodbyes, I just told him in a voice message to delete me. That shouldn’t have been my choice, not really. How can you just cut someone off like that and then never think about it again? Like death, once it’s visited and departed, the grief is surely going to haunt you at times, even when you’re crashing on and fixing everything wrong about your life. This was worse because he was still on the planet and I could still make good that decision. But it was too late. And that was a whole other relationship, an entire tragedy at the end and that’s not the point. The point was, I didn’t allow myself to grieve (I didn’t know how to grieve). We had been apart before, and you can get used to someone not physically being there when you know they’re still alive and well, but the grief of losing something so profound, something that actually changed the entire course of your life, that ended your marriage, that dragged you to a new and exciting and thrilling path, the grief of losing all that, is immense. Over the past few years, that has filled me up at times and consumed me, and caused me to do and think all manner of things that are dark and unpleasant. But still, I don’t know how to deal with the grief. It manifests in the strangest and most obscure ways. Except pretend that everything is going okay and that life is good. And there’s a lot to be said for that, isn’t there? It’s better than lying sobbing on the bathroom floor? And he comes to me in my dreams all the time, usually wearing a black and white striped top, and he doesn’t say a word but we hold each other tightly, and still I can’t speak. Even in my dreams. I can’t tell him how much it kills me for him to be alive, and for him to not be in my life.

And then comes Stella. I’ve written about this. Again, a different type of grief, when you know death is coming and it’s just a matter of time. When you have a little bit of time to prepare yourself. And I did better this time. I went to say goodbye, and I looked death in the face, and it was heartbreaking and it was emotional, but I told her that we shouldn’t cry and we didn’t. Then when she passed, I was devastated. And I did cry this time. I did have an emotional outburst, and I was on my own, so nobody could see that I wasn’t strong, or capable, or a bloody cold-hearted superwoman who was just powering through the loss of so many people who meant so much, in very different ways.

And this Thursday, at 11.00 am, she will be cremated on her own, and someone apparently will read some words out about her and she will go into the fire. And she came to me in a dream last night, telling me how to cook fries in an air-fryer and she laughed at me because I thought they needed to be in there longer, and they were all lying on a bed of peas. And, oh, the irony.

So, this Thursday I have to do some grieving. I will be on my own because Simon is at last retired and has gone to travel the world. And I have to make some decisions now about selling this house and moving on properly. And that will be a little bit of grief, too. Because things finishing are very sad, aren’t they? Even when they come from a good place of friendship. And they tell you to remember the good times and the memories, but as time moves on, they seem so very far away, and you forget voices, and you forget how things made you feel, and life feels so small and so fragile and the grief builds up and up and up.

Until surely you must explode?

And when you let it out. Surely that must make you feel better?

I’ve no idea how to finish this.

I must do better.