Tag: Grief and Grieving

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How to mourn someone who did bad things

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[G]rief is hard enough in itself.

But when your feelings towards the person who died weren’t all warm and loving, grief becomes complicated.

Take the death of Mark Salling, who took his life after pleading guilty to the possession of thousands of images of child porn. It’s natural to feel grief at his passing, but this comes tinged with guilt (are you allowed to feel sad when the person who died did a terrible thing?), resentment, confusion and hurt.

Or take the passing of a parent who treated you badly, an ex-partner you cut out of your life, or a relative with whom you had a complicated relationship.

Grieving in these cases is a murky mess that can leave you feeling isolated and mentally tangled. Are you supposed to grieve? Are you allowed to still feel anger at someone who’s died?

Here’s some advice on coping.

Give yourself permission to grieve

Regardless of someone’s actions, as terrible as they may be, they’re still a person who was around and now isn’t. It’s natural to feel shock and deep sadness, even if you hadn’t had contact for years or your opinion of them has long been negative.

Don’t feel guilt for feeling deeply sad that the person has died. They had an impact on your life in some way, and it’s okay to mourn them as a result.

That doesn’t mean you’re forgetting what they did. You can feel more than one thing at the same time. Give yourself permission to feel grief – it’s better to experience and explore it than try to hold it all back.

It’s okay to feel anger

While the person’s death may bring up old feelings of hurt and anger, for someone else it may be a much more straightforward relationship. Cue tributes calling them a wonderful person.

That can make you feel like thinking or feeling anything negative towards the deceased is disrespectful. It’s not.

Someone’s death does not erase the effect they had on other people, and their disappearance doesn’t erase the trauma they may have left behind.

You are not being disrespectful for feeling rage over the person’s actions. You are allowed to feel angry.

Be aware that the person’s death will trigger different feelings in others

Within the death of Mark Salling, a lot of different emotions will be triggered.

‘Everyone’s grieving something,’ Andy Langford, of Cruse Bereavement Care, tells Metro.co.uk. ‘They’re grieving him, or something he’s done.’

People may be mourning Mark’s loss, while others may be triggered by discussions of child abuse being brought into focus, or upset by a high profile suicide.

That’s the case with any death. While you might be angry, someone else will just be incredibly sad. Another will be even angrier. Someone who didn’t know the person might be triggered by the story of their death or what they did.

Seeing each other’s reactions won’t be helpful, and neither will arguing with each other about the ‘right’ response to the person’s death.

hile you may want to tweet about how the person is awful, another might need to express their mourning. It’s not fair to chip in on someone else’s process and criticise how they feel – grief is complex for everyone, and you have to respect that.

It’s hard, but try to keep your feelings about the deceased out of the public eye, or at least let the initial shock and sadness simmer down. You never know how your tribute or anger could bring up feelings in someone else.

‘People need to be careful with what they put on social media,’ advises Andy. ‘It’s permanent, it’s there, and people can use it however they like.

‘When people respond in anger, they can inflict disquiet and pain in others. This doesn’t diminish the pain you’ve experienced.’

Don’t react too quickly

When you’re experiencing a massive cocktail of different emotions, it’s easy to act rashly.

Take a breather, ask for some time off work if you need to, and avoid any situations where you might do something you regret.

It may be tempting to arrive at the funeral and announce all the things the person who died did to hurt you, but this will likely cause hurt to others and leave you feeling empty. Living out those immediate reactions is rarely as satisfying as you imagine.

Accept that resolution may not come in the way you expect

When you’ve had a complicated relationship with someone, you fantasise for years about finally getting that big showdown moment; the time when you’ll confront them with all that they did wrong, they’ll understand and apologise, and you’ll feel released.

Very few people actually get that showdown moment.

That doesn’t mean you can’t get some closure. You may be able to move forward by chatting to a therapist, going through a period of mourning, doing the empty chair exercise (exactly what it sounds like. You address someone as if they were sitting in an empty chair opposite you), finding out more about them, or gaining a greater understanding of why they did what they did.

There are many different forms of resolution, and the person’s death does not have to prevent you from continuing to live your most fulfilled life.

Write a letter

Writing a letter to that person is one way to get a sense of closure, and a way to explore all the different things you’re feeling. It’s a safe space to express emotions that might not be wise to share publicly, whether that’s resentment or a profound sense of loss.

Dedicate some time to getting it all out on some paper for a sense of release.

It’s up to you what you do with the letter afterwards – keep it, burn it, give it to someone so they can understand what you’re going through.

Just know that this letter is for your benefit, no one else’s, and you should feel free to write whatever you like without any shame or guilt.

Ask for help if you need it

There is absolutely no shame in finding someone’s death difficult to deal with, especially when they did something that caused serious emotional or physical pain.

Ask your GP to refer you for bereavement counselling, or find a private therapist with whom you can arrange as many sessions as you need.

Don’t worry that you won’t have anything to say or that you don’t really know what you want to achieve. Therapy is a safe space where you can explore your feelings with no pressure, seeing what comes up and dealing it thoughts as they come.

It sounds scary, but it’s not, and it can make getting through the mourning process much less distressing.

Remember that there’s no ‘right’ way to grieve

Everything you feel is entirely valid – hate, anger, hurt, loss. It’s all okay. You can’t blame yourself for how you feel in reaction to someone’s death.

‘Every case is different and somewhat unpredictable,’ Marcus Gottlieb of Notting Hill Therapy tells us. ‘If someone’s been cut out of your life, or you’re deeply angry about what they did at some point, your feelings on losing them – a “bereavement” which of course you may not even know about until much later – are liable to be intensely complex and hard to articulate.

‘But then grief can ALWAYS entail a different, individual cocktail of emotions – sadness, despair, relief, numbness, anger and so on.

‘There’s no “right” way, and there’s no “right” length of time to go through the experience. Rituals can help, conversation can help, time above all else.’

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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Understanding Grief

By JANE E. BRODY

[A]lthough many of us are able to speak frankly about death, we still have a lot to learn about dealing wisely with its aftermath: grief, the natural reaction to loss of a loved one.

Relatively few of us know what to say or do that can be truly helpful to a relative, friend or acquaintance who is grieving. In fact, relatively few who have suffered a painful loss know how to be most helpful to themselves.

Two new books by psychotherapists who have worked extensively in the field of loss and grief are replete with stories and guidance that can help both those in mourning and the people they encounter avoid many of the common pitfalls and misunderstandings associated with grief. Both books attempt to correct false assumptions about how and how long grief might be experienced.

One book, “It’s OK That You’re Not OK,” by Megan Devine of Portland, Ore., has the telling subtitle “Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand.” It grew out of the tragic loss of her beloved partner, who drowned at age 39 while the couple was on vacation. The other book, especially illuminating in its coverage of how people cope with different kinds of losses, is “Grief Works: Stories of Life, Death and Surviving,” by Julia Samuel, who works with bereaved families both in private practice and at England’s National Health Service, at St. Mary’s hospital, Paddington.

The books share a most telling message: As Ms. Samuel put it, “There is no right or wrong in grief; we need to accept whatever form it takes, both in ourselves and in others.” Recognizing loss as a universal experience, Ms. Devine hopes that “if we can start to understand the true nature of grief, we can have a more helpful, loving, supportive culture.”

Both authors emphasize that grief is not a problem to be solved or resolved. Rather, it’s a process to be tended and lived through in whatever form and however long it may take.

“The process cannot be hurried by friends and family,” however well meaning their desire to relieve the griever’s anguish, Ms. Samuel wrote. “Recovery and adjustment can take much longer than most people realize. We need to accept whatever form it takes, both in ourselves and in others.”

We can all benefit from learning how to respond to grief in ways that don’t prolong, intensify or dismiss the pain. Likewise, those trying to help need to know that grief cannot be fit into a preordained time frame or form of expression. Too often people who experience a loss are disparaged because their mourning persists longer than others think reasonable or because they remain self-contained and seem not to mourn at all.

I imagine, for example, that some adults thought my stoical response to my mother’s premature death when I was 16 was “unnatural.” In truth, after tending to her for a year as she suffered through an unstoppable cancer, her death was a relief. It took a year for me to shed my armor and openly mourn the incalculable loss. But 60 years later, I still treasure her most important legacy: To live each day as if it could be my last but with an eye on the future in case it’s not.

Likewise, I was relieved when my husband’s suffering ended six weeks after diagnosis of an incurable cancer. Though I missed him terribly, I seemed to go on with my life as if little had changed. Few outside of the immediate family knew that I was honoring his dying wish that I continue to live fully for my own sake and that of our children and grandchildren.

Just as we all love others in our own unique ways, so do we mourn their loss in ways that cannot be fit into a single mold or even a dozen different molds. Last month, James G. Robinson, director of global analytics for The New York Times, described a 37-day, 6,150-mile therapeutic road trip he took with his family following the death of his 5-year-old son, collecting commemorative objects along the way and giving each member of the family a chance to express anger and sadness about the untimely loss.

Ms. Devine maintains that most grief support offered by professionals and others takes the wrong approach by encouraging mourners to move through the pain. While family and friends naturally want you to feel better, “pain that is not allowed to be spoken or expressed turns in on itself, and creates more problems,” she wrote. “Unacknowledged and unheard pain doesn’t go away. The way to survive grief is by allowing pain to exist, not in trying to cover it up or rush through it.”

As a bereaved mother told Ms. Samuel, “You never ‘get over it,’ you ‘get on with it,’ and you never ‘move on,’ but you ‘move forward.’”

Ms. Devine agrees that being “encouraged to ‘get over it’ is one of the biggest causes of suffering inside grief.” Rather than trying to “cure” pain, the goal should be to minimize suffering, which she said “comes when we feel dismissed or unsupported in our pain, with being told there is something wrong with what you feel.”

She explains that pain cannot be “fixed,” that companionship, not correction, is the best way to deal with grief. She encourages those who want to be helpful to “bear witness,” to offer friendship without probing questions or unsolicited advice, help if it is needed and wanted, and a listening ear no matter how often mourners wish to tell their story.

To those who grieve, she suggests finding a nondestructive way to express it. “If you can’t tell your story to another human, find another way: journal, paint, make your grief into a graphic novel with a very dark story line. Or go out to the woods and tell the trees. It is an immense relief to be able to tell your story without someone trying to fix it.”

She also suggests keeping a journal that records situations that either intensify or relieve suffering. “Are there times you feel more stable, more grounded, more able to breathe inside your loss? Does anything — a person, a place, an activity — add to your energy bank account? Conversely, are there activities or environments that absolutely make things worse?”

Whenever possible, to decrease suffering choose to engage in things that help and avoid those that don’t.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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In a new book for kids, the son of Grim Reaper offers lessons about death and dying

Portland writer and illustrator Winslow Furber wrote the book to help parents and kids talk about mortality.

Winslow Furber wrote and illustrated “A Very Young Reaper,” about Tim Reaper, far right, the son of the Grim Reaper, to help families talk about death and dying.

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[A]s a parent, Winslow Furber wanted a better way to talk to his kids about death. As a creative person, he was seeking an outlet for his ideas.

The result of both yearnings is Furber’s first children’s book, “A Very Young Reaper,” which tells the tale of young Tim Reaper, the son of Kim and Grim Reaper. Everything Tim touches dies, leaving him sad and alone because no one wants to meet the son of the Grim Reaper. Until one day, when he meets a very old porcupine who teaches the boy that what makes him different than everyone else is also what makes him special.

Furber wrote and illustrated the book, issued by an Indiana-based on-demand publishing house, to help families talk about death and dying with kids, as well as the concept of death with dignity. The book also speaks to the idea of adapting your world and lifestyle to accommodate people who are different and who possess peculiar, other abilities.

Furber, who lives in Portland and works as a building contractor, has been thinking about death with dignity and related issues since college, when his roommate’s mother suffered a difficult, painful death from cancer. “I’ve had some experience with the death of pets and having to have that conversation with my own two children,” he said. “I just thought it would be nice to have something that works around the whole death-with-dignity theme. I started thinking about a very young reaper – the son of Grim Reaper – and how he would grow up, overcome obstacles and come to grips with his own unique circumstances. How does he adapt to the fact that everything he touches dies?”

“A Very Young Reaper.” By Winslow Furber.
AuthorHouse. $16.99.

Furber is sharing proceeds of book sales with the Center for Grieving Children, the Animal Refuge League and the Death with Dignity National Center.

Furber, 54, has always had artistic instincts, but spent most of his professional life working for others. He was a financial planner for many years – “the worst mistake I could have made” – and worked as director of development and maintenance for SailMaine, which supports community sailing programs in the state. He’s an avid sailor and loves spreading his family’s love of sailing with other families.

A few years ago, he went off on his own as a contractor, enabling him to work for himself and balance his many interests. He went to Middlebury College, where he majored in sculpture and also studied math and physics. He also makes jewelry, and ultimately would like to make art all the time. “I’d like to stop swinging a hammer and tell more stories,” he said.

The book is a step in that direction. He attended a children’s book conference in New York last February and began writing the book soon after. He pitched “A Very Young Reaper” to several publishers and ultimately decided to go the self-publishing route because he didn’t want to wait for a publisher to come around to his idea.

“I sent it out to six or eight publishers, and got one to talk to me. The publisher said, ‘It’s a beautiful story, but you are going to find it very difficult to find a publisher willing to take a flier on it,’” he said. “I felt it was important to get it out. I would have loved to have had something when my kids were little, when the bunny died. That’s what Tim does. He helps people who are old or sick.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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‘There will be an afterwards’: how a mother prepared her sons for her death

When Kate Gross was dying, aged 36, she told her sons there would be life after her death. But how would they actually cope with losing her?

‘Afterwards, you will need to …’ Kate Gross with her twin sons Isaac, left, and Oscar

By Jean Gross
[W]hen my grandson Isaac was very small, his mother, Kate, would say, “I’ll miss you” when she travelled away for work. Later, when he was three, I remember him running after her in the park when he couldn’t quite keep up with her, crying: “Don’t miss me, Mummy.” To him, “to miss” meant “to leave”. “Don’t miss me, Mummy”, meant don’t leave me.

But, in the end, Kate did have to leave him, and his twin brother, Oscar. When the boys were five and she was 36, she died. It was Christmas Day 2014, minutes before the boys woke up to ask their dad, Billy, if it was time to open their stockings.

In the months before Christmas, once Kate had been told her cancer was terminal, she came up with a way in which we could all talk about a future without her. She called it Afterwards. “Afterwards,” she would say “you will need to …”, “Afterwards, Billy will …” Now, with some distance between us and that worst of Christmases, I want to write about Oscar and Isaac’s Afterwards – how they have managed, and whether Kate’s fears for them, or her best hopes, have come true.

It is a positive story. The boys are now sturdy, happy eight-year-olds. We have learned, with surprise and relief, how resilient they are, and how easily they have taken to the fact that their mum is not here – and yet is still here, in the fabric of her house, in the memories, in the ways in which we constantly tell them they resemble her.

Initially, the boys each reacted very differently to their loss. Oscar is stoic and factual by nature, with a passion for numbers. When we told the boys their mum was going to die, he asked how old people were when they got cancer. Billy said it was usually when you were old; their mum was unlucky.

“How old is Mum?” asked Oscar.

“Thirty-six,” said Billy.

Then, “And how old are you, Dad?”

Oscar was working it all out, with numbers as his guide, and Billy knew to tell him that he wasn’t likely to get cancer, too.

Of the two boys, Isaac has always been a little more worried about love and loss, always at a different point on the objects-facts v people-feelings scale. After Kate died, he initially had more hurt places than Oscar – manifest in tummyaches at school and a wish to stay in and “help” his kind teacher, or occasional oblique insights into sadness. I remember being in the car taking the boys to change from school clothes into smart new jumpers and shirts for Kate’s funeral. I told them that some people might cry at the funeral. “Why?” asked Isaac. It’s just something grownups do, I said. “Why?” persisted Isaac. I said they would be sad because they missed Mummy. There was a pause, then Isaac said: “I had a dream.” I asked what his dream was about. “I was on a train and Dad wasn’t and the train went off without him.”

But apart from these brief moments, there has been little sign of grief or worry. Oscar likes to tell me his bad news, like a cat bringing a mouse it has caught and tenderly laying it on your pillow. Once told, it becomes less important. But the bad news has never been about Kate, only grazed knees, fluffing a save in football, missing his computer time at school. Her death did, however, offend his sense of justice. “It’s not fair,” he said when we first told him she would die soon. “The other children in my class will have mummies.”

Kate and her mother, Jean Gross, with Isaac, left, and Oscar

Grieving, I think, asks that you live in the remembered past or a denuded future. Oscar and Isaac still pretty much live in the present. Nor have they a great capacity for introspection. Once I told them they had been unlucky to lose their mum. “Why?” asked Isaac. They didn’t understand; they were unable to examine their experiences, as distinct from simply living them.

There is little point in expecting young children to be sentimental. The summer after Kate died, we were on holiday in France, visiting a church; the boys saw candles and asked if they could light some. For Mummy, we said, and thought of her. But for them what mattered were the immediate sensory experiences – the physical act of striking a match, and the satisfying clunk as the offering money fell to the bottom of the collection box. Things don’t stand for things when you are small. They simply are.

I have often wondered why is it that some children cope with adversity, while others falter and fall. Research tells us that resilience is linked to social support – a sense of belonging to a community, and having at least one adult in your life who believes in you as a worthwhile person. And they have social supports in abundance – Billy, their dad, of course, and all the family and Kate and Billy’s friends. Just as important has been the boys’ own social circle. The children at their small, loving, Catholic school, and their parents, have closed around Oscar and Isaac and created a force field that keeps the Dark Side well away.

Science has been helpful to the boys, too; their dad is, after all, a scientist. They wanted, and got, proper explanations about cancer cells and death. A few months after Kate died, we heard them chatting in bed: “Everything dies eventually,” said Oscar.

“No one lives to infinity,” said Isaac.

Religion, doled out at school, has given the boys a language in which to talk about their loss. People often told them that their mum was in heaven, and they accepted this. In one bathtime discussion, Oscar told me: “There must be heaven.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because if there wasn’t, where would God live?” he said triumphantly.

Even so, you have to be careful. One of Kate’s friends, whose wife died when his three girls were small, told us that one of them had said she wanted to be run over by a bus, “so I can go to heaven and be with Mummy”. As for, “God took your mummy because he wanted her to be with him in heaven,” I can’t think of anything more likely to make a child seriously annoyed with such a selfish higher power.

Angels are safer territory. At a birthday party, when the children were colouring in angels, Isaac said: “My mum’s an angel.” Oscar agreed: “Yes, she is.” But the angel for the top of the Christmas tree got broken last year and this year we had to get a star instead. I wondered if the boys were confused, what with these broken and unbroken angels. How do children make sense of all this? And how do they reconcile science and belief?

Becoming older and growing in understanding, the boys have talked recently with their dad about this. “It’s belief until it’s proved and then it’s science,” the boys told me.

“So what about angels,” I asked.

“They must be belief ’cos you can’t see them flying round, can you,” Isaac replied.

It is hard to know exactly what the boys do remember about Kate. We try to help by talking about her, whenever we can. Many people have told us how important it is to keep the person who has died in the conversation. A kind stranger, for example, wrote to us: “Both my parents died of cancer. I’m sorry for your loss. PLEASE tell stories about your Kate to your lovely grandsons. We stopped talking about our mother when she died – it was a black space that became hard to fill.”

Sometimes, I hold Kate up as an example for the boys to live up to. When they were complaining about having to keep going back over pieces of writing at school, to “improve” them, I told them that when their mum was writing a book, she had an editor who suggested changes to words and things to move around. I told them how hard she worked to make those changes. “And did she have a rubber?” asked Isaac, concerned.

We had a letter from a woman who lost her own mother as a child. She wrote: “My middle sister and myself had funny little memories of my mum and it truly wasn’t until I had my first child that I recall missing her.” Perhaps that will happen to Oscar and Isaac; I expect they will circle round the idea of Kate’s death and come to it at unexpected moments in unexpected ways. Maybe some later loss will take them back to how it felt in childhood. Or maybe, in a few years, the loss of a mother will simply give them a convenient hook on which to hang their inevitable non-specific teenage angst.

I hope they will be OK, long-term. But right now it is clear to me that they are not diminished by Kate’s absence, unlike us – my husband and I – who are. And if Kate could come back, just for a moment, I would tell her that she need not have been afraid. Oscar and Isaac are fine, just fine.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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They say writing is cathartic, but writing about my parents dying almost killed me

Writing about her parents being killed when she was 14 forced Erin Vincent to relive the trauma for over six years. It brought her to the brink of suicide

‘Suddenly it all made sense. By writing my book I had unwittingly re-traumatised myself and have spent the last 10 years trying to find my way back.’

By

[B]efore writing a memoir about my parents dying in a road accident when I was 14 I went around saying, “So my parents died, what’s the big deal?” I wholeheartedly believed that I had come away unscathed. When the topic of parents came up in conversation I would say, “Oh, my parents are retired; they live up the coast.” I figured I wasn’t lying as they had retired, from life, and if you believe in life after death, which I do and don’t, depending on the day, they were living up from the coast, all coasts.

So, how did I go from death denier to published memoir writer? Quite by accident.

I had just turned 30 and was starting to remember things from before my parents’ accident. We hear so much about people repressing traumatic memories but we humans also tend to repress good ones if they serve to remind us of all that we’ve lost. So in fear of losing the memories again I started writing them down and turning them into stories for myself. I figured that if I lost them a second time I could just go back to what I had written.

As I recalled days at the beach, my father’s weird hobbies, and my mother dancing around the house to her Neil Diamond records, I started to feel compelled to also write about what life was like after they were gone. So I steeled myself and wrote about wearing a hot pink dress to my mother’s funeral. I wrote about the constant fear that my three-year-old brother would die if I took my eyes off him for just one moment when we were out in the world. I wrote about the night of my parents’ accident and being told my mother was dead.

After several weeks of this it occurred to me that I was writing the kind of stories I wished I’d had when I was in the midst of grief and thought I was losing my mind as I struggled to get up each day each day and go to school, and once there, try not to run from the classroom screaming. So, on I wrote.

After reading a few of my stories my husband suggested I write a book. This was the era of Angela’s Ashes and Running With Scissors and he jokingly said, “Hey, when it comes to sad stories two dead parents trumps them all.” He was wrong of course but thought it would urge me on.

I resisted for a long time but then wondered if I could write a raw and honest book about my own grief that might actually be of use to some people; maybe help them feel less alone than I did when I read grief books with covers photos of lavender fields and sunsets that told me grief came in five (only five?!) stages and that grief was like the rain. Grief is nothing like the fucking rain, I thought. If anything, grief is like being lost at sea in a raging hurricane.

So to dispel those myths I decided to write a memoir about my experience and honestly believed I could “knock it out” in six months. How hard could it be? I’d been a journalist writing about other people, so writing about myself, a subject I knew well, would be a cinch.

How wrong I was – about the writing, and about myself.

About a year into the writing I wondered why I was so tired all the time; why after writing for an hour or two all I would want to do was sleep. I thought I was just being lazy so I pushed myself harder.

Determined to remember as many details as possible I decided to bombard my senses. I bought CDs of the music from my childhood and items with familiar smells such as Play Doh, my dad’s Old Spice, Brut, my sister’s Charlie perfume, the 4711 cologne my mother used to wear, the brand of glue I used in grade school. And there I sat at my desk writing, sniffing and listening to Barry Manilow, Whitney Houston, The Police, Blondie, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Neil Diamond.

Not long after this I became itchy, literally. Large red hives started appearing all over my body. Convinced I was having some kind of allergic reaction I proceeded to change soap, laundry detergent, shampoo, and I stopped smelling the perfumes and aftershaves, but nothing worked. Then came the debilitating stomach pains, diarrhoea, and vomiting, which led me to hospital for a colonoscopy, which found nothing. I became listless, was crying on a daily basis, my hair became limp, my nails brittle, and eventually I had trouble getting out of bed. And yet, not once did I attribute any of this to what I was writing.

And then one night I decided I couldn’t go on and that my husband’s life would be more joyous without his sick, miserable wife. I had it all planned. I was going to write a note that said something along the lines of, “Babe, do not enter. Just call the police. I love you.” This was going to be taped to the bathroom door before I locked it, sliced my wrists and laid in a warm bath and drifted away. But then I thought about grief, something that was on my mind daily. Could I put him through that? I tried to reason with myself, “But once the grief is gone, he can live a happy life”. But still … grief. Could I, of all people, cause the person I loved most in the world to experience what I had? No, I couldn’t. So the note was never written. Instead I put the razor away, collapsed on to our bed in a sobbing heap and wondered how I would go on. Somehow I did. And I kept writing, in shorter spurts now that my energy was so low.

As I sat at my desk one afternoon, staring out the window because I was too tired to do anything else, my teary-eyed husband, handed me a printout and said, “I think this might be you.” It was a “depression checklist” that he’d found whilst doing some research for a photo series he was working on. And then it all made sense. I was depressed. How did I not see it?

We talked about me ceasing the writing but I explained that I couldn’t. I had come this far and it would all be for nothing if I didn’t finish. So we came up with a plan. I would only write for one hour a day and would go and see a psychologist to see if she could help me get through it. I also went on antidepressants which eventually lead to a host of physical and mental health issues that I am still recovering from. (This last year I went through hell trying to ween off the drug Cymbalta)

So with a loving husband, psychologist, and pharmaceutical drugs in tow, I wrote and eventually finished my memoir. It would be a couple of years before I sold it to a publisher and had to go through the whole experience again during the editing process. By the time I was done I had relived the night of my parents’ accident on a daily basis for six years. I thought I was numbing myself but I have since discovered that I was actually rewiring my brain.

Studies have shown that replaying traumatic events over and over again is equivalent to living them, in your brain and your body. Your brain reads the information as though the event is happening in that instant. I recently read Dr. Bessel van der Kolk’s book The Body Keeps the Score in which he says, “Flashbacks and reliving are in some ways worse than the trauma itself … a traumatic event has a beginning and an end” but a flashback can happen anywhere, anytime and for an indeterminable length of time.

Suddenly it all made sense. By writing my book I had unwittingly re-traumatised myself and have spent the last 10 years trying to find my way back.

It’s funny, the main thing people say to me when discussing my book is how cathartic the writing must have been. I know they want me to say that it was, but I refuse to perpetuate the lie that writing about your pain is freeing when that is not always the case.

And now when people tell me they plan to write a memoir I want to caution them about the possible costs of such an endeavour. And yet, I want to be supportive, I don’t want to be the person who tries to kill a writer’s dreams.

Writing a book isn’t easy but dredging up your past and writing about it can be self-inflicted torture.

But who am I to tell you not to embark on that memoir? All I can say is: you’ve been warned.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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The final act of love: reclaiming the rites of modern death

As people search for ways to reclaim death from the funeral industry, a home vigil can help with the grieving process

‘‘Death loses its power over us when faced matter of factly.”

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[P]ete Thorpe was a wiry, strong and vital man. He loved his children, his wife, Fiona Edmeades, and the home they shared in Bondi. At 69, he was a well-known local character who was regarded with great warmth by all who knew him.

In early October he was laid up with stomach flu. It struck and didn’t budge for two days. Everyone expected that he would be back on his feet by the weekend. But on the evening of the third day – a Tuesday – Thorpe died suddenly of a heart attack.

“It was the last thing on earth … ” Edmeades explains, looking out of the window of their flat into the treetops, searching for the language to convey the shock of how her life had ruptured. “He just died.”

In the chaos of the hours that followed that moment, she knew one thing – Thorpe was not going anywhere.

“I knew I wanted to keep him with me,” she says. “Pete was Māori so that is the tradition in his culture – I had attended a couple of tangis so I knew it was possible.”

The tangi is a Māori death rite that involves close and extended family remaining with the dead for three days to mourn and honour them. “I just felt there was no way they could take him away,” she says.

Edmeades’s GP wrote a death certificate for Thorpe that night, which meant his body didn’t have to be taken away to the coroner’s. He could stay in the flat with his family, under New South Wales regulations, for five days.

He remained there until Friday afternoon. He was mourned at home and his funeral, organised by local funeral directors, was held there. Friends visited the flat and cried for him and told him jokes and sang songs and slipped small gifts into his hands. Extended family decorated his coffin in the back garden. Edmeades and their children placed him into it and sealed the lid themselves. They drove him to the crematorium and accompanied his coffin to the furnace door.

Edmeades says having him at home with her, their children and friends, helped her to process his death. It helped her face up to the fact that he was gone, especially because his death had been such a shock.

“As hard as it was to look at Pete and see it wasn’t Pete any more, it is just his body, it was so much less hard than having him disappear – poof,” she says.

“To be able to understand it in your body on a physical level means you can free yourself from the denial. Seeing that lifeless body is how you come to terms with the death and if you can’t come to terms with the death, how can you grieve? It would have been so traumatic if he just disappeared.”

Instead of Thorpe’s body being taken away that night to lie alone in a morgue or funeral home, Edmeades made a bed for him in the sunroom adjacent to their bedroom. It was his favourite room in the house and, with him there, she and her daughter could lie on their bed on that first night and see him.

‘I just felt there was no way they could take him away,’ says Fiona Edmeades of her husband, Pete Thorpe (pictured), who died suddenly.

“I was able to look at him all night and slowly understand the changes and that things had changed. He was still there and I could see him but the change was real, in such an unreal time.

“I would doze and then wake up and there was this wave of feeling utterly lost, but then there was Pete, anchoring me back in the world.”

The family’s story is becoming more common, as people decide to take death, dying and the days after death away from the medical and funeral industries and back into their own hands and homes.

Victoria Spence, an independent funeral celebrant and death doula, has noticed a groundswell of people in Australia over the past decade wanting to reclaim death for the family and the community.

Spence has worked with the dying, their bodies and the people they leave behind since the 90s when her father’s terrible funeral – the celebrant repeatedly got his name wrong – inspired her to train as a counsellor and civil celebrant specialising in end-of-life and after-death care.

She has seen communities transition from the need to whisk the dead away, hide them in a box inside a funeral home and then bury them in the ground like a secret. Instead she empowers the bereaved to bring their dead home from the hospital, wash them, dress them, hold their hands, talk to them, play music, build their coffins and hold their funerals in the community centre, school or living room. Taking death back in this way can set the groundwork for healthy grieving, she says.

“People feel alienated by the medicalisation, professionalisation and corporatisation of dying that has taken place,” she says. “Death has become a cultural blindspot for us and people want that to change.”

It is a sentiment echoed by Prof Ken Hillman, author of A Good Life to the End, who argues that death has become the new taboo – like sex was in the 1970s.

Pete Thorpe’s extended family decorated his coffin in his Bondi back garden.

“We only talk about [death and dying] in hushed tones,” he writes. “The subject of death and dying need to be brought into the open. There will be so many benefits for us as a society and individuals. Death loses its power over us when faced matter of factly.”

But dealing with death matter of factly is not always straightforward.

Often the thing stopping the bereaved from keeping their loved one at home is the lack of preparation and knowledge about what comes next, Spence says. Fear of the changes that take place in a dead body is also a potent deterrent.

“There is an increasing desire but not the knowledge to help people get ready and get the equipment,” she says.

The most important part of equipment for someone wanting to keep a vigil at home is the cool bed, a stainless steel plate that goes underneath the dead body and is usually set at 1C to 5C, keeping the corpse stable by slowing decomposition.

“Our dead change,” Spence says. “The body stiffens, the skin changes, there can be swelling and leakage. The cool beds slow down all of these processes, you get into a state of stasis.”

Once the bed is installed, Spence says, “It is very comforting to hang out with the body for a couple of days. Nothing untoward or scary happens.”

People holding vigils are often surprised at how peaceful and beautiful the dead are, she says.

Fiona Edmeades worried about all of this when Pete Thorpe died. But a close friend knew about the cool beds and the funeral home organised one.

“The cool bed changed everything because it reduced the aspect of the unknown and the fear that comes with it,” she says. ”Here is this amazing device that enables you to do what you want to do. It just feels so natural.”

Over the three days after Thorpe’s death, their home filled with friends and family. At first, some were hesitant to see him but their reticence always gave way.

“Lots of people who hadn’t seen a dead body before came. One child came and asked, ‘Can I touch him?’ and we talked all about it. When you are in it, it is so natural and gentle and beautiful – it is a beautiful way of saying goodbye.”

For her, having Thorpe at home, and a river of people wanting to come and show how much they loved him, made her own grieving easier.

“It helped us to deal with it together as a whole. In those first few days the weight of the grief is so overwhelming. Sharing Pete’s death with the community in this way helped spread the load. It felt like everyone was carrying a bit, as we slowly came to terms with what had happened.”

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

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When Grief Becomes a Mental Health Issue

By Becky Oberg

[W]hat do you do when grief becomes a mental health issue? Recently I lost a friend to suicide, and it made me think of all the other losses I’ve suffered. Two memories stand out in my mind–the death of my maternal grandfather to cancer and the death of my paternal grandmother to a stroke. One was a mental health issue, the other was not. There are several things people can do when grief becomes a mental health issue.

Grief and A Tale of Two Deaths

My maternal grandfather got cancer in the ’80s, when it was a virtual death sentence. My family never discussed it. It was especially hard on my mother, who took the stress out on the children. To this day, she does not like Halloween (when he was diagnosed), Thanksgiving (the last holiday he spent with the family; he told us to go and eat the turkey instead of worrying about him and we children said our final goodbyes), and Christmas Eve (when he died). Things at home fell apart, and I became well acquainted with depression–to the point where a teacher said something. It took me years to even talk about it–it led to emotional abuse at home, where it was understood we would “get over it.”

The death of my paternal grandmother was shortly after I graduated college. The family supported each other, and it didn’t hurt as badly even though it was sudden. My boss gave me time off and sent flowers, and the town brought enough food to feed all 13 of us immediate family members several times over (as my cousin said, “We’re Germans. We eat.”) I left shortly after the funeral because I had a psychiatrist’s appointment the next day. She said to me, “You look depressed. I’m increasing your medication.”

I replied, “I just buried my grandma. I’m supposed to look depressed. If you’re going to increase my medication for normal reactions to life events, this is just legal substance abuse.”

It did not go over well, but I still stand by my statement. Sometimes grief becomes a mental health issue, but, sometimes, it doesn’t. It depends on a number of factors.

Factors in Grieving Becoming a Mental Health Issue

Obviously, the relationship you had with the person will impact your grieving. But so will several other things, like the way he or she died, religious beliefs, and support from other family members and friends. Having lost friends to suicide, murder, disease, accidents, and natural causes, I can honestly say traumatic death is harder on the survivors and almost always requires mental health counseling. But it seems to be random when it comes to non-traumatic death.

Faith is a double-edged sword. It can help the loved ones to know the deceased is no longer suffering. However, as is especially true in the case of traumatic grief, faith can be sorely wanting. Questioning “why” can be frowned on in some circles, but sometimes we need to question “why.” In addition, religion frowns on suicide–mourners at my friend’s funeral remarked that it was good we could talk about it since they wouldn’t be able to at most churches.

Support is crucial. I remember when a psychologist made an offhand remark to me about “the first year” of grieving. Seeing my puzzlement and concerned about my comment, “Aren’t we supposed to be over it by then?”, he explained that grief is a process that doesn’t have a time limit or set order (Nine Common Myths And Realities About Grief). He also explained to me it was okay to talk about it–and I joined his grief support group to do just that.

How to Tell When Grief Requires Mental Health Help

I needed help after my maternal grandfather died, largely because my mother needed but did not get help after his death. As she cycled through denial, anger–a lot of anger–and depression; it seemed she would never accept it. She became emotionally abusive toward us kids, but maintained some semblance of a normal life for years. No one knew the hell that was going on at home. Eventually she came to terms with it, but not before some lasting damage was done to us kids.

If you can’t talk about your grieving, you need mental health help. If you take your grief out on others, you need mental health help. And if you want to join your deceased loved one sooner rather than later, run, don’t walk, to a counselor (Suicide Prevention Chat: How Does It Work?).

Remembering the loved one will bring happiness and pain, sometimes within hours of each other–as my then-six-year-old brother observed after my maternal grandfather’s funeral, “People go to the church and cry then come back to the house and have a party.”

It is normal to reflect on the life of one who died, the circumstances leading up to the death, the death itself, and the funeral with mixed emotions. Obsessing, however, is not, and neither is constant sadness. Seek mental health help if grief begins to interfere with your ability to live your life.

You deserve to come to terms with the death of your loved one, and chances are that’s what your loved one would want. Don’t hesitate to ask for mental health help if you need it.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!