Everything I know about grief...

I've spoken to a variety of people about grief this past year, here's what I've learned from them...

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

I sat down to type, this title in mind, and found just one word came to mind. Nothing. I was going to write “nothing.” I know nothing about grief.

That can’t be true. I’ve spent the last 18 months writing about it almost every week in this newsletter. I’ve tried to create a safe haven where, following my own lead, we can all untangle the complicated mess of feelings that surround grief. I’ve done this by inviting others to use their pens as a form of therapy, to write their most secret thoughts about grief with me, and you. I’ve sat down, in coffee shops, over Zoom, and heard whole life stories, learning so much that afterwards I have to nap for hours, images and words circling a mind that’s almost stoned with sorrow.

Yet, “nothing” is what appears, when I read this newsletter’s title.

Why?

I don’t think this is imposter syndrome sneaking in and hissing at me to be quiet. Instead, I think it’s down to how we frame knowledge, and what’s worthy of our time. If I had spent the last year and a bit studying, say, flower arranging, I’d be able to present a bouquet of all of my learnings, demonstrate clearly “look what I can do, look at this tangible demonstration of all of my time spent.” With grief, that’s impossible. It is not a skill I am learning, or an exam I am revising for.

I know, at some point, grief is going to knock me over again. I know that it’s going to push me over, trample its grey footsteps across my skin, leaving me bruised, black and blue. I will beg grief to leave me alone, and it won’t care how much I know, who I’ve spoken to, how many words I’ve written… It will batter me all the same.

But… I guess that’s the first thing I know about grief. There’s very little point in searching for solutions for it. It is not a puzzle to be solved. I could spend my lifetime studying it, reading all the literature, deciphering all the studies and still, still not be able to escape it. We can’t mend ourselves from something so seismic. We must surrender.

Grief is a crashing wave, and we have to let it pull us under.

Eventually… the tug and the pull of it won’t be so violent. It will no longer flood us.

So, if that’s the first thing (quite a big thing) then what else do I know?

We all grieve differently

I wanted to write that how we grieve is as unique to us as our fingerprints. But that just wouldn’t be true. That implies that we each have a grieving pattern that we will follow each, and every time. One we can begin to recognise and therefore recognise the path out of. It is, as I’ve said, not a puzzle to be solved - and this newsletter is not a guidebook.

But, this is something that I have learned. Something I wish I’d known, that perhaps I can hand over to you, in the hope that you can gain comfort from it. I’m not here to tell you how you’ll think, feel or act. I can’t even do that for myself. My next “era” of intense grief will look very different from my last. To apply a formula to such a universal, yet unique, process, is impossible.

Yet, we try… We try so hard to grieve in a way that’s “right” that it exhausts us. We try to parrot the depictions of grief that we see all around us, and feel “wrong” when we don’t manage. This includes grief on television, in films but also in our lives… we could see someone sobbing at the funeral, our own faces dry and think “why can’t I do that?” We could find our own grief won’t hit for months, for years… There are so many different ways to grieve, as there are so many different people, circumstances and relationships to grieve.

I can’t speak for every experience. There’s so much more to explore. But, pulling at the strands of my own life, I can now recognise that grief, and how it will display within one lifetime will differ each time, and it won’t arrive how you expect it to. Even if you’ve had practice.

When I lost mum, at 19, I didn’t just lose the person, I lost a future with that person. I will grieve her in differing waves of intensity throughout my life, as she should have been here. I will watch my friends have what I want to have, what I thought I would have, and grieve not just who she was, but who she could have been in those moments. Who we could have been in those moments.

There’s a lot said in grief discussions about missing out on the big days: the mum not there for her daughter’s wedding day, her graduation… but a lot of the time I mourn the small things. I will want to know, and never know, what she might think about my life. What would she think of my husband, of my house, of my career? Would she like the friends that I have made? Who would we gossip about? Would she give me advice on my relationships, would I agree with her? What would I find frustrating about her? What would she find frustrating about me? What would we bicker about? We change who we are throughout our lifetimes and our relationships change with us. I lost not just my mum, but a version of myself, a part of my future, that will haunt me, questioning, for the rest of my life.

When I lost my grandma, a few years later, it was still a loss, it’s still a wound but it’s a different wound. A future wasn’t torn from us, as she died naturally, of old age. I grieve simply: her. But, at the same time, that grief isn’t simple (it never is). I felt like I wasn’t ‘allowed’ to grieve her, that everyone loses a grandparent so I should just suck it up and get on with my life. I didn’t give myself any space to acknowledge that loss, and its impact on me. Equally, on both occasions, I was trying to parrot what I expected grief to look like, and punishing myself for falling short on that.

I can’t type a picture here, one in which you, accurately, will see your own grief staring back at you. But, what I can do is share my story, my feelings, and see if there are strands of similarity. I can then use those strands of similarity to look back and be softer to my old self. I used to carry, and still do carry (on some days) guilt surrounding my behaviour and whether I grieved in the ‘right’ way. So much of our lives, not just within grief, is trying to match an idealised version of some behaviour, or person, that doesn’t exist. The more we open up about the individual ways in which we experience grief, even the parts we’re most ashamed of, the more we can recognise that no one is doing this perfectly. And within that we can actually begin to take on the very sensible, but very hard, advice to “be kind to ourselves.”

Learned from… Well, everyone. LIVING. But specifically, this conversation and this one with Rachel Wilson, who set up The Grief Network, for young grievers.

Accept the things you can’t change

What a simple, little annoying sentence, right? Accept the things you can’t change, I type, like it’s fucking easy. It’s not easy. At times, it’s not even possible. What? So we just accept that life flings hideous things at us, for no decipherable or controllable reason, and we just take that? We exist knowing that, just around the corner, something painful lurks, hissing and waiting to pounce? That this will happen, again and again, throughout our lifetimes? We will deal with one pain, then another, then another? Sometimes all at once. How? How do we do that?

The thing is… we just… do. We really don’t have any choice in the matter. And, as I’ve gotten older, I think (Ithink) I’m getting more comfortable with this knowledge. I learned, during my formative, learning years, that nothing is guaranteed. Our health, the health of those we loved… that can all be snatched away in a moment, with very little warning.

In many (very natural) ways that deeply messed me up. But it also made my life what it is today. I seek out joy, and fun, whenever I can. I try to be kind to people, both strangers and friends. I know, not only that we don’t know what people are going through, but also that, when we are going through something we may be behaving in a way that’s unrecognisable even to ourselves. We need to allow both ourselves, and others, space and grace to do so.

My next step, however, is to learn how to live in a way that allows me to seek out moments of pure hedonism, while also finding out where my values are. After all, it’s all very well living life like each day is going to be your last but, more often than not, it isn’t. We wake up, pull the curtains open, and the day is – miraculously – here again. I don’t want to consume pleasure in spikes and troughs, I want to pursue the things that make me feel good, for longer.

Part of that, I’m finding, is going back to accepting that there’s so much I don’t have control over. Letting my life be, just for a bit, rather than chasing it. I chased for so long, thinking I was going after what I wanted, what I needed. I was going so fast I couldn’t recognise that I wasn’t chasing happiness, I was running away. The two were so similar I don’t blame myself for not recognising this sooner. The two are so similar I’ll probably do the exact same thing, all over again. But I flailed about for years searching for a level of control that doesn’t exist. I’m slowly being able to recognise where I can make a difference and where I can’t. And, within that, I’m finding (some) peace but also something bigger: a long-lasting appreciation for who I have been, and who I am yet to become.

Learned from: Again, TIME but also this conversation with Rev Marion Chatterley who, through her outreach work, has spent time with people during their lowest moments, managing to save some, but not others and whose own grief helped her accept this.

Your memory is not a library

A stand-out happy memory from my childhood was rollerblading, with my dad (her Substack can be found here) to the French patisserie. We’d skate along, together, on weekend mornings and collect flan tarts to take back home again. I recounted this memory recently, to a journalist, who was asking me about the joys of having a trans parent. She wanted some happy moments from my childhood and this was one that came to mind. It was so vivid to me. I can remember dad’s rollerblades, hers were black and chunky, and my rollerblades were white and lilac.

It was after publication that my dad said to me, “I don’t remember this.” At first, I must admit, I was a bit cross. I thought “why are you trying to take away a happy memory from me? If it made me happy, why are you telling me you can’t remember it?” But, after chatting, I realised what had happened. Dad did get her own pair of blades, but she couldn’t skate on them. I can’t remember this, as when we’re that young, we don’t like to think of our parents being fallible. So, what will have happened is I will have skated alongside dad, on foot, to the patisserie. My point? We are not reliable narrators of our own lives. We also can’t treat our memories like libraries, where we can go in and place ourselves, right back where we want to be. Our memories also won’t match, like snap cards, with other people’s.

I struggled with remembering my mum for a really long time. I still do. I wanted to use the memory of her as a comfort blanket, but all I found were the scratchy, uncomfortable moments. I felt guilty about this. Like I wasn’t remembering her how she should be remembered. But it’s OK if I remember her gnarly parts, as they were a part of her. I have also struggled with the different recollections of both my mum, and my grandma, from others who knew them. How, sometimes, they didn’t match mine. Again, I’ve come to realise that’s also OK: when you have two unreliable narrators, you’ll never find the truth. So, instead of trying to create a picture perfect lifetime movie of your time together, I think it’s more important to focus on how a person made you feel, the majority of the time. The details don’t matter, but how you felt does.

Learned from… Both this piece, where I interviewed neuroscientist Mary-Frances O Connor about what happens in the brain when we grieve, but also this one, where I spoke to Sarah Tarlow, an archeologist, who wrote a memoir about losing her husband very slowly and wanting to capture him as he was, rather than an untrue, fake version of himself.

Wow. So, as I began typing, I realised that I do know quite a bit about this chosen topic of mine. 2013 words to be precise. And there’s more I could have said, but this is getting long and I want to cook a bowl of pasta. So, a more accurate title for this newsletter would have been: here are some things I’ve learned about grief this year. Now I’m going to throw it over to you, what do you think you’ve learned about grief? What would you like to know, but perhaps, realise is impossible to know? Let me know in the comments and thank you, as always, for reading my work and helping me to untangle all these difficult knots. Lots of love.