'I promise it won't always hurt like this'

A conversation on loss and long-term grief, with bestselling author Clare Mackintosh...

A few weeks before Easter, we’d go for a walk. Mum, me, my sister, Bex and Dad, with our dog Pip bounding along beside us. We’d be searching for the perfect branch: it had to be a mini tree of its own, with as many tiny off-branches as possible, but, most crucially, it had to have buds… pearlescent buds, full of promise for the Spring to come.

Back home, we’d fill a jam jar with water and place the branch in it, placing it in the centre of the round wooden table we ate dinner on each night. We had a collection of wooden eggs, hung on ribbons, that we placed, gently on the branch – it was our Easter ‘tree’. And, by the time the long weekend rolled around, the buds would have bloomed. Spring had arrived, hope blossomed.

This was my mum’s tradition. She had quite a few, most occasions were marked in some way or another. Apple bobbing at Halloween; Auld Lang Syne lyrics printed out for Hogmanay… She saw life as a celebration and took any excuse to dance within it.

I like to think this side of her lives on in me. I love parties, and bringing people together, but I also believe in adding little flourishes to each day. Buying £1 daffodils and placing them in milk bottles, and lining them in windows; adding droplets of eucalyptus oil to the bottom of the shower, letting the scent be carried by the steam…

If I can I’ll host an Easter party, or I will pull whoever is left in London together for a roast, handing out fluffy bunny ears and mini chocolate eggs. One rainy long weekend we even chucked eggs down the hallway, not letting the downpour outside stop us. This weekend I’ll be in Edinburgh, poorly dressed and grappling with the wind, throwing eggs down Arthur’s Seat, shaking off the hangover from a wedding the day before.

I’m breathing, I’m living, I’m dancing and I’m celebrating for her. She flows through my veins, she exists in my lungs, in my wide pupils, in the follicles of my hair…

I miss her at Easter, at Halloween, on Hogmanay… Each and every day. I miss her.

But…

I wouldn’t wish her back, mostly because I couldn’t wish her back. There’s no point in pining for impossible things. But also… I am who I am because of her, but I am also who I am because I lost her.

I carry my grief with me, my need for her, with me… but it’s not always painful. It’s defined who I am, but it hasn’t overtaken me. It’s simply part of my essence, like colour swirling in a paintbrush pot.

I’ll miss her this Sunday, but that won’t stop me from laughing, from dancing in the air that still carries her presence.

If you read this newsletter a lot, it may come as a surprise that I question myself each time I write passages like the above. Every day people are facing raw, tear-your-skin off pain and loss. This particular loss of mine is 19 years old. It’s an adult.

I fear, not only that people will think ‘get over it’, but also that my (for lack of a better word) ‘whinging’ sends a message: that loss, pain and grief do overtake us, that they become the defining factors in our lives. I want to be open and honest about the realities of grief but I also don’t want this letter to become misery-lit. How can I provide comfort for those living, and suffering, with grief decades after their loss, while also providing hope for those fresh and raw in the crossfire of it?

Quite recently, a friend asked me to recommend some books to read on the topic of grief. I struggled. I didn’t even want to direct her to this newsletter as, for the above reasons, I worried my writing would not be helpful. This isn’t necessarily true, it might have been, but also, who am I to say what helps, and what doesn’t? Grief is a universal experience, but it’s also a uniquely individual one. What helps one person might not help another. Some people find deep solace in reading the intricacies of another’s pain, knowing that they’re not alone in their own agony. Yet, for others, entering into the room of someone else’s grief (as, so often, when reading you feel beside the writer) is too much to bear.

Which is why I think what Clare Mackintosh has done is so masterful. Her latest book (she’s a bestselling author) I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This is one I’d comfortably recommend, as it balances both the light, and the dark, of grief. Clare, when she lost her son, Alex, at five-weeks old, searched for solace in books and couldn’t find it – as so many tried to ‘solve’ grief, placing it in the neat, labelled stages. This impossible check-list that no one can really work their way through. Then, later, when she lost her father, she discovered a different sort of grief, one that she was not – or could not be – prepared for.

She’s taken both of those experiences, and provided 18 compassionate, short assurances, that show those “deep in the weeds of loss” that “it won’t always hurt like this” while also making those of us who carry our long-term grief feel less alone with that burden. Speaking to her reminded me why I push through these feelings of discomfort, ignoring the hissing on my shoulder, and keep trying to open up the grief conversation. So much of what we are told of it doesn’t match the reality of it. We have to craft out new, more realistic grief writing… and Clare’s book really does that. Whatever stage you’re at in your grief, I hope you’ll gain some comfort from her words, and our discussion…

First of all, I love your book. I think it’s going to help so, so many people as it really manages to bridge the balance that people in grief need. We hear a lot that grief doesn’t go away and while I do think that’s true when you’re in the really, really painful stage of it, hearing that could make you feel like you’ll feel that way forever. Which is why the title [I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This] already has some assurances in it. It says this isn’t something you’re going to get over, but it won’t hurt as much.

But, in order to write this book, you’ll have had to delve deep back into the pain of your past, and those moments immediately after Alex’s death. How did you find the process?

No one is ever going to ‘get better’ from grief, but I wrote the book because I felt like I’d come such a long way – that I had reached a stage where I was OK, for the most part.

But during the writing of the book, I realised I had a lot more emotion to process. One of the things that I have always done with my grief is to compartmentalise it. I think that is relatively common with people, especially those who are ‘copers’ and are used to being capable, in control and efficient. Grief is the antithesis of all those things. A lot of us put it in a box, and we control when we open that box. And for me that's worked really well – but when I started writing I realised I had some bits and pieces still loitering around in the bottom of the box that I hadn’t quite come to terms with.

When did those come out?

The first draft was quite difficult to write. It was upsetting in parts, but it was also enjoyable, and it felt important to me. It was cathartic. Then my editor, who has first-hand experience of living with grief, read the first draft and her perspective and guidance was invaluable. But a lot of her marks amounted to ‘yes, but dig deeper, tell me more about this, give a scene that really encapsulates what you’re saying’ – and that was really hard.

The second draft was like gouging into my open wounds and pulling everything out. But once I'd finished it I felt so much lighter, as though I had unlocked another layer of peace.

I can really understand that, as, when I write this newsletter I don’t have an editor, but, when I’m commissioned to write about grief I find it much harder, as the editor is forcing me, in a gentle and kind way, to confront the things that I have compartmentalised.

One of the things I'm fascinated by is how much control we have over what we bottle away and when we unpack it, because we live a society now where there’s so much therapy speak and the general attitude of ‘no you must confront your emotions and you’ll get to a better place.’ In many ways, that’s true, the things I have confronted have brought me to a better place, but I also believe boxing certain things away has also helped me. It’s why I felt it was so important for you to write about not being able to give Alex’s clothes away and how that’s something people tell you we should do, but, often it’s a physical reaction of just ‘I can’t do that.’

It's so important that we do things on our terms. When I was in the weeds of grief, the books I found most helpful were either first hand experiences of grief, or novels, where you can view grief through the filter of fiction. What I didn’t find helpful were the self-help books that said, ‘do this, do that’ or ‘this is what you’re feeling, and this is why you’re feeling it.’ I found that confrontational and I would feel defensive about it. Generally speaking, when I am struggling I don’t want someone to give me the answers. I don’t want someone to say, ‘just go for a run.’ It’s OK to wallow.

When it comes to compartmentalising, it’s often because we have gone through something so out of our control that it’s a way of trying to gain that control back. It’s about saying, ‘I can’t deal with this right now, because I've got a million things happening.’ But then at the weekend, when the kids are in bed, you might put on a film that’s going to make you cry. It’s almost like we schedule our emotions. And I don't know whether that is a good thing or not. I don't know if it would be better if we just like burst into tears everywhere.

For me personally, I got to a point where I needed to stop bursting into tears all of the time and the way that I did that was to compartmentalise. I know that’s a trait that was definitely exacerbated by being a police officer – because as a police officer you can’t burst into tears at the drop of a hat. We went to some horrific incidents, and we had to shut emotions away and deal with them at a later date. I think that’s what I did with my grief.

I would schedule things. I'd have like a little box of things that reminded me of mum and I would sit and read about her, and it was my time. But really there is no right way.  

None of us can predict how we're going to be, which means we have to be extra kind to other people. It’s easy to expect someone else to be feeling better by a certain point or to think ‘if I was in your situation, I would be doing x y z’, but actually we don't know how we're going to behave. We don't know how we're going to cope with grief until it happens.

It's not even something that we can practice, or get used to. You wrote about how when you lost your dad that was a different sort of grief. I used to think that because I lost mum at 19 the one good thing would be I’d be equipped as to how to handle grief but that’s not true, it is, and it will be, different every time.  

You don't know how much of an old grief is triggered by a new one. It’s such a complex issue. It’s so under discussed and that's why it's so brilliant that you write your newsletter and we're having these conversations about death, grief and mourning. Because we are so bad in this country, in particular, at shutting things away. A process in publishing is that my publishers sell my rights to different countries around the world. I have a number of foreign publishers and so when I Promise was ready to go out, it automatically went to those publishers for consideration. I was so taken aback as some countries came back and said, ‘why would we need a book to help people grieve?’ There are some cultures that just wouldn’t entertain the idea of needing resources to help us grieve, whereas, in Britain, we’ve got so many of them.

I went to a Death Café at a music festival in Budapest and there were all these people from different cultures there, talking about death and grief, and it was fascinating seeing the differences and how quiet we are in our culture when it comes to speaking about it.

We are so quiet about it. Even down to the physical act of crying – in some cultures, crying in itself is a big act. It's noisy, and it is heart-breaking to witness because all their emotions are coming out. It’s very public and it's very demonstrative. But if you think of a British funeral, you'll get a stiff upper lip still, and you'll get the single tear, rolling down someone’s cheek. We try so hard to keep it all together. And it's just not good for us.

Then we're often praised for that. It's very like: ‘oh, she's doing amazingly I've not seen her cry once.’ What were your impressions of grief before you lost Alex and what were they shaped by?

I didn’t encounter grief much when I was in the police force. I didn’t have one tenth of the compassion that I have now, and I would like to go back to my former self and be able to have better conversations about grief. Three of my grandparents died before I was old enough to be cognizant of it. My grandfather died when I was 14. I remember I was sad, but I think I was sort of sad in a slightly abstract sense. What upset me more was seeing my parents upset. My remaining grandmother died when I was 20, but we had reached a point where death was a release, so I understood that it was the right thing. So there was nothing in my immediate orbit until Alex died. It was so very shocking and horrific.

One of the things that I really struggle with is that I only have one photograph with him. Eighteen years ago things were a bit different - we weren't using camera phones in the same way we do now, but not taking photos was also a conscious decision I made, telling myself that there would be plenty of time, that when the baby was bigger and the tubes were gone and everything was a bit brighter, then there would be time for photos. And there just wasn’t. So I grieved that. I still grieve the fact that my mother never held him. With my dad, I have a lifetime of memories to look back on – both in my memories, but also in the physical world. I can go and look at his ties or at photos, or I can watch videos of the wedding speeches to connect with him. I don't have that with my son – instead what I have is this big absence, this lost future.

You spoke also about triggers to grief, and how supermarket beeps brought you back into the hospital, as well as the pandemic really bringing back your grief. That was a connection I’d never considered before as I struggled a lot during the pandemic and perhaps it was bringing me back to somewhere I wasn’t quite aware off…

I think there was a kind of collective grief. We were grieving our people. We were grieving our lost freedom. We were grieving for the horrendous conditions that the medics were working under. We were grieving lost jobs. There was so much going on and it was such a difficult time. I think that a lot of the conversations around grief and mental health have been accelerated as a result of the pandemic. That is a good and positive thing to have come out of it.

Another thing I really connected to was this idea of grief fatigue. I remember, for years after mum died, I would just sleep all the time and I felt really ashamed of it. I felt like I was lazy. But, looking back, I was healing from something and I needed rest but this is the first time I’ve ever  And obviously looking back it's like you see it's because I was healing from a trauma and I needed that rest. But I don't think I've really seen much to do with grief fatigue.

This fatigue is not tiredness, it is an exhaustion to the bone from emotion. It takes so much energy to grieve, and it takes so much energy to function on top of your grief. There's this immense physical fatigue along with the need to shut the world out, because it is too hard to be awake. My sleep was horrific for well over a decade. A combination of utter fatigue and total insomnia. I think there's a lot of masking involved in grief, isn't there? Because at some point we have to present like a normal person. It's fine in the early stages, because everyone expects you to be grieving. Fast forward two or three years and if we were sobbing walking down the street and someone stopped you and asked what's wrong and you said, ‘my mother died’, they would assume that had just happened. It’s likely they would struggle to understand knowing it happened years and years ago. So this masking, to conform with a society that hasn’t caught up with the reality of what grief looks like, is a really exhausting thing to do.

I definitely felt my grief had a time limit, and because of that I don’t think I processed it. I thought ‘there’s been this funeral, I’ve had a big cry, done, that’s my time up.’ Years later was when what had happened really hit me. I found that hard to admit to others, and even when I set up this newsletter, I thought people would say ‘oh you’re still not over that?’ But the opposite was the case and instead most of the feedback has been from others in long-term grief saying they can recognise themselves in my writing. I think that’s what is lovely about your book, it will be useful for those fresh in the face of grief, but also those processing longer-term.

The other interesting thing is that we often don’t learn how to process any emotion until we're much older, certainly if you lose someone as a child or a young adult. At the ages of 18 or 19 we can’t really work through things – it’s why we have bad relationships and why we make bad choices when we are young. So, it’s so natural to revisit grief you experienced as a young person when you’re older. I'll be 48 this year, and I finally feel that I am exactly who I am, in every circumstance. I know what I want, what I need, what I feel about things, and I am in a stable position to be able to process the things that go on in my life.

So even though I was 30 when my son died, I was still working out who I was. I think it's important to acknowledge that we will come to our grief at different times and from different perspectives. I tend to look at grief as a chronic illness, in the way that someone living with a chronic illness knows that the illness is not going to go away. There will be flare ups that are worse than others, and there will be different ways of managing the pain and they will need to respond to their changing illness over their lifetime.

I Promise It Won’t Always Hurt Like This by Clare Mackintosh is out now, and available to order here.

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