My life sometimes seems to have been so full of tragedy it has sometimes been hard to breathe. 26 years ago, a man I had loved took his own life. He was 35 years old, a successful doctor with a brilliant career and a life full of friends and family. I was 27. He suffered manic depression and schizophrenia. Yet most of his achievements seemed unreal and senseless to him as he could never get rid of the intense burning pain inside his heart and soul…. so much agony he could no longer go on.
Sometime after his death, I started writing as a way of expressing my pain, my lost love, and of my grief following his death. More and more I have begun to question whether I
had a choice about the grieving, whether I could have stopped it, or whether the grief itself was a disability. This journey of grief has been full of anguish and sorrow, but also one of great growth and new joy. In many ways, his death was his greatest gift to me, a rare jewel constantly prompting me to look within, to take life by the throat and never give up. It took me many years to make sense of his death, to be able to accept it as a major positive contribution to my own life and positive personal growth.
Perhaps I could have made a choice about whether I allowed the grief and sadness to consume me? Ultimately it was a way of making sense of his death, but for a while it also allowed me to wallow in my wretchedness, too afraid to heal in case the healing would denigrate his life. At times the wallowing allowed me to excuse myself from life, to excuse myself for not fulfilling my dreams and goals. It was a very acceptable cop-out, and one that no-one would dare deny my right to! How easy would it have been to give in and live with the sadness forever, to never accept the new me?
When you experience a loss or tragedy so great it illuminates your whole being with sadness, one which seems impossible to recover from, then maybe grief is a disability. The
stages of grief ranging from anger and denial, to the enveloping apathy and general lack of lustre for life takes its toll on your ability to survive each day in the way the rest of the world expects you to. It is initially impossible to believe there will eventually be acceptance and recovery, that you will stop feeling this intense pain. Just when you think you are healing, you hear a song or smell a scent that throws you right back in to the pit of your grief. It is often one step forward, and then many steps backwards as you relive the
intensity of the pain.
After the initial shock and severe emotional pain experienced with a new grief comes the need for help. In the beginning there is always a shoulder to lean on, a shoulder to cry on and a helping hand. It is there for the first few days and weeks, sometimes even two or three months after the funeral. Then it seems to disappear. For others, their lives go on as if nothing has happened, whilst for you, life keeps crumbling down around you. Your judgments are impaired; your other relationships undergo strain due to the constancy of your grief. Your work suffers, and your general sense of well-being disappears. For a long time, it is impossible to remember any of the bad times with your loved one; rather you can only remember the very best of your times together. The sense of emptiness in your own life and towards your friends is off-putting to them, and unbearable to you. Life seems void.
This grief forced me to look inside my own heart, to accept my dark side, to delve into my own life deeply and to stop using my past as an excuse for not living life to the full. It helped me turn other negative experiences into inner strengths and to develop resilience. It helped me to whole-heartedly embrace new experiences, to welcome them with open arms. They are a large part of what has helped me become the person I am today. My journey has taken me along many different paths, many of them stained with pain and loss and sadness. Life has offered itself to me with no boundaries, and I have had to make a choice to survive and grow and heal through each extraordinary event.
